Necessary Testing
by Cybele3
Summary: An unexpected revelation tests Niles' and Daphne's relationship.
1. Chapter 1

It was Mel who told him. Of all people.  
  
Daphne was out that afternoon, picking up things for the apartment they'd just begun to share - "let me surprise you," she'd pleaded, after Niles had told her he wanted this to be her apartment as much as hers and that she should have as big a share in the decorating as she liked. In fact, he hadn't intended things to go so far as Daphne's picking out stencil patterns and knick-knacks unsupervised; but she had begged him, and he'd never been able to resist her when she begged. He'd never been able to resist her under any other circumstances, either. And so she'd gone tripping out that morning, swinging her purse jubilantly, Niles' VISA tucked safely inside her wallet. He was checking his watch nervously, wondering how much - and what - she could have accrued in the four hours she'd been gone, when his cell phone rang. Probably Daphne, he thought, pulling it out of his breast pocket.  
  
But it wasn't. At first he couldn't tell who it was. "Niles," the voice said, sounding distant and somehow flat.  
  
"Er -" He switched the phone from his left hand to his right. "Yes, this is Niles Crane." He waited. Silence. "Um - can I help you?"  
  
"Niles -" sounding a little impatient - "It's me. Mel."  
  
"Oh! Mel," he said, standing as a dart of adrenaline shot through him. "Er - I didn't get your voice, I'm sorry - you sound so distant, perhaps your connection -"  
  
"We need to talk," she said, calmly enough, but sounding strange, somehow. Vague.  
  
"Talk?" he said, sitting back down again. What on earth could they have to talk about? They hadn't spoken since the night of Frasier's disastrous opera board party, when Niles had finally stood up to her for Daphne's sake and she'd stormed out, with half his social circle right behind her. The few necessary communications after that night had been done through lawyers, and even those had ceased entirely months ago. What could she possibly want now? "Mel, what's going on?" he said, recovering himself slightly. "We haven't -"  
  
"You have to listen to me," she said, talking over him again, still in that odd, flat tone.  
  
"I'm listening. I just -"  
  
"I had been seeing a man named Brian," she went on. "We started dating two months ago and we were becoming more serious about one another -" and what was *wrong* with her? He could have sworn she was reading off a sheet of paper. "So we had a blood test done."  
  
Ah, yes. He remembered that. Niles had dated many neurotic women, but Mel was the first he'd encountered who'd been neurotic enough to insist that he undergo a blood test before she'd let him touch her. It was a mark of how much he'd cared for her, then, that he'd braved the needle to prove to her he was safe. In the spirit of fairness, she'd been tested as well, and they'd gone into the relationship with their minds at ease on that score.  
  
He gradually came to realize the pause which came there was rather longer than it needed to be. And especially for this conversation, through which she'd been rattling so smoothly and monotonously. "Is something. wrong?" he prompted, less out of concern than impatience.  
  
"Of course something's wrong!" she snapped, and by then her voice was trembling distinctly. She broke off there; he waited, more confused than ever. He could hear it when she began reading from the paper again. "The tests indicate that I am -" she stumbled here again, slightly - "HIV positive." (what?) "Apparently it takes six months to show up in the tests -" (what had she said?) "which means that this dates back to the time of our relationship. So -"  
  
"*HIV?*" he managed finally. "Mel, what in God's name are you -"  
  
"So I felt I should call the matter to your attention," she continued, unbelievably. "Since it seems reasonable to assume that you are - that you are the one who passed this on to me."  
  
"*Me?*" he cried. "You're not making sense!"  
  
"I'm making perfect sense." She had to be leaving the script behind now, but you couldn't tell from her voice. "You were tested before we began sleeping together but as I said, the virus can take up to six months to show up in bloodwork. I have been with no one since we split, and I had been alone during the six months prior to the testing we had done. I can only assume that you had not." She let the words hang in the air for a moment.  
  
He waited, helplessly, with absolutely no idea what to say or do. His thoughts seemed to be spinning out of his control - he felt himself pinned against the wall by the centripetal force of what she'd said, as they swung gaily around him, eluding his grasp. He tried to sit down and realized he was already sitting. Cleared his throat. "Mel -"  
  
"You will need to be tested again, but what happened seems clear," she said. She paused. "Daphne will need to be tested as well."  
  
"*Daphne?*" He leaped up, and he probably would have taken a swing at her if she had been in the room. "Don't you dare bring Daphne into this -"  
  
"Have you been listening to me!" she cried, and suddenly the studied wooden blandness had vanished from her voice. He shrank away from the pain he heard there. "I am not bringing Daphne into any of this! Do you think this was an easy call for me to make? Do you think I wanted to admit that I give a shit what happens to you or to her? I am telling you that I have AIDS and that you gave it to me and now Daphne has it too. And I -" She broke off, voice shaking. He stood in the middle of the room, trembling, letting the silence drag on. Finally she said "I took some Valium earlier, but it doesn't seem to be working anymore, does it? I'm going to take a few more now. Goodbye, Niles."  
  
"No! No, wait," he said, and surprisingly, he didn't hear a click on the other end. He was sufficiently startled that he forgot what he had been about to say, if he had ever had anything to say. The silence lasted a moment longer.  
  
Finally Mel spoke. "I thought, when you left me, that that was the worst thing you could ever do to me," she said. "I can see I was wrong." Then she hung up.  
  
He sank back onto the sofa, pulled a pillow to his chest, and tried to focus.  
  
Focus. 


	2. Chapter 2

Sitting wasn't working, he wasn't focusing. Maybe if he stood -  
  
AIDS.  
  
Standing, no, pacing, perhaps, here. Pacing back and forth and then in circles under the ceiling fan, imitating its broad pointless circular sweep, hearing the slight rattling of the pull chains suspended from it. Pacing and thinking or trying to think, but -  
  
I am telling you that I have AIDS -  
  
why couldn't he get a grip on this? Why couldn't he -  
  
--and that you gave it to me.  
  
But - no. No. This was ridiculous. This was impossible. How could he have AIDS? He had always been careful. Lord knew he had never been promiscuous. He'd barely been sexually active - not just in the last six months; he could practically count all of the lovers he'd taken in his life on one hand. He had -  
  
A memory curling up unbidden from farther back; tendrils of smoke, wispy and ephemeral at first, then gaining definition and solidity - a memory he never touched unless he had to -  
  
That time. That one time -  
  
No. Ludicrous. He wasn't -  
  
He could have been.  
  
He wasn't!  
  
"He wasn't," he said aloud, suddenly, to verify the thought. The words sounded hollow, rattling against the chains on the fan.  
  
"He couldn't have been."  
  
No answer.  
  
He checked his watch, as if the information would somehow do him some good. 4:19. When would Daphne be home?  
  
--and now Daphne has it too.  
  
He couldn't face her. Couldn't.  
  
And he needed to know what this was about. Well, didn't he? He couldn't very well tell Daphne anything when there was nothing to tell. What would he say? That Mel had made one deranged phone call, that she'd made several unsupported assertions and then had hung up to go take more psychoactive medications? Ridiculous. He needed to know.  
  
He checked his watch again. 4:19 still. As he watched, the digits slipped to 4:20.  
  
So he would find out.  
  
He strode across the room quickly and grabbed his coat. Nearly tripped on the carpet as he strode even more quickly to the door. He caught a glimpse of the sharp, glinting corner of the marble-topped table to his left - pictured himself catapulting toward it, spearing himself, pictured crimson blood spurting from the wound, and now the wound would endanger not only himself, but anyone who came near -  
  
No!  
  
He regained his balance, walked out the door to find Mel. 


	3. Chapter 3

He drove with surprising skill to Mel's place - his hands steady on the wheel, his eyes trained and focused on the road. Somehow, the automatic action of driving seemed to help to clear his head, inasmuch as he nearly forgot why he was driving to see Mel in the first place. The needle on the speedometer stayed at precisely at 33 mph. Two miles under the speed limit. Of course it would make no sense whatsoever to be pulled over for speeding, he thought.  
  
He parked - parallel-parked, actually, and perfectly - a short ways down the street from Mel's building. When he got to her apartment he was briefly stymied; he should have known she'd have had her locks changed. He spent a good five minutes fiddling with his wallet and keys, looking for a key he obviously didn't have, the key that would fit the new lock. That was when he first recognized clearly that he was afraid to go in.  
  
Standing on his tiptoes (not having Mel's advantage of five-inch high heels), he felt along the top of the doorjamb, and there, sure enough, was the spare key. Funny, that she hadn't changed its location. Then again, if she didn't trust the doorman's discretion she'd never have hidden her spare in such an obvious place to begin with. In reality, Niles barely remembered brushing the man off, and he certainly hadn't been pursued. Perhaps the man had simply assumed that Niles and Mel were reconciling. Or perhaps he hadn't cared.  
  
Pointless thoughts. Procrastination. Open the door.  
  
He turned the key in the lock and went in.  
  
The apartment was still, and the air was oddly stale, as if fresh air had been the least of Mel's concerns in these last few days. He walked through the apartment calling her name, hesitantly at first and then more firmly, forcing himself to remember why he was here. He was here to demand answers from her. He needed the truth, needed to know what to expect before he did anything so rash as ordering a blood test. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts, in fact (his thoughts and those damn eyes in that damn face that seemed to be hanging before him all the time, regarding him solemnly, as if - *no, he wasn't!*) that he barely registered that there was no answer to his calls. It also never crossed his mind that she might have gone out somewhere. Which is why his shock was even less than his current lack of affect might have rendered it when he entered the bedroom and found her sprawled carelessly across the bed, one arm and part of her head sliding over the edge. The empty prescription bottle standing on the nightstand made the whole situation perfectly clear.  
  
He forced himself to cross the room to her, still moving as if in a dream, and picked up her arm, the one dangling over the side of the bed. He found a pulse. "Good," he said aloud. It sounded strange, as if the voice were not his own. The pulse wasn't particularly strong, and he had no idea how long it had been since she'd taken the pills, so he walked back across the room to the phone, dialed 911, gave them the name and location and pertinent facts. He declined to give them his own name or his relationship to the victim (was that what you called it, a victim? the victim of a suicide attempt? Self-victimization, was that what this was?). He hung up the phone and went back again, to make sure she was still breathing. She was, though he didn't know for how long. He knew he should stay with her until the paramedics came - in fact, as a medical doctor, he was bound to stay until help arrived - but he couldn't make himself do it. They were on their way, after all. "And she's a medical doctor," he murmured to himself, for no reason at all. "She'll be all right." His hand moved to smooth back a lock of her hair; it hovered in the air just above her head indecisively for a moment, and in the end he couldn't make himself do that either. He turned and walked out of the room.  
  
As he walked back down the street to where his car was he saw the ambulance come flying down the street, siren blaring and lights flashing. "Good," he said again, and climbed into his car.  
  
He drove away, but not back to the Montana. He needed to be alone. To think.  
  
He spent the next four hours driving aimlessly through the rainswept streets of Seattle, as gray day faded to twilight faded to black. 


	4. Chapter 4

I notice my reviews are tapering off. I would just like to announce that the fewer reviews I get the meaner I will become to Niles and Daphne. How's that for an ultimatum?

Heh heh.

Of course, there exists the possibility that no one is reading this and that it therefore will not matter how mean I get. But never mind that. Review, damn it, review.

Chapter 4

But driving soon ceased to help him. It had a numbing effect at first, as it had had when he'd been driving to Mel's apartment; but he'd been more in shock then, his feelings more easily suppressed. They were creeping in now around the edges, and he began driving more recklessly, squealing around corners, screeching to a stop at red lights or simply running them altogether. The third time he did this an oncoming car had to brake sharply, blatted his horn, and Niles was surprised to find himself leaning on his own horn in response. He accelerated briefly out of the situation, and realized what a mess he was rapidly becoming. He swiped a few tears out of his eyes angrily and tried to think. The only logical thing to do would be to go home, but he couldn't face Daphne. Not at all. If he had – if he –

No. No thinking about that. At least not until he'd had the test done.

But he didn't seem to be able to stop thinking about it. A scattershot barrage of memories assailed him, laid down irregularly like machine gun fire. A quick montage of happy moments with Daphne flickered by – impossibly happy, shot through a gauze lens and fuzzy around the edges – and eventually, as he flinched away from one mental snapshot after another, he recognized how dangerous his driving was becoming and pulled to the side of the road, in the middle of an unpretentious residential neighborhood. When he was still, a sense of her flooded him briefly, and he laid his head against the steering wheel, unable to face what he had done to her. What he might have done to her. He still had no concrete proof that Mel was correct. Even if she was infected, how could she possibly know he was the one who'd done the infecting? He didn't exactly live a high-risk life –

It all jerked to a stop there. Of course.

__

If you're going to be honest with yourself you know –

No! It was one time! It didn't matter! It doesn't matter!

Say what you will, the fact is that –

No! Stop it!

But it wouldn't stop, the thought wouldn't stop this time, and he was going to have to face it sooner or later_. Either I drive into the bay and put an end to this or I start facing up to it,_ he thought, in a fleeting moment of emotional lucidity.

So he sat back in the seat and let his mind go where it would. 

__

He'd split with Maris long since – it had been over a year since he'd found Schenkman in her bed, and their divorce had been finalized three months ago. Finalized by Donny Douglas, who would naturally have therefore been one of Niles' favorite people of all time, had he not concluded his lap of triumph by sweeping Daphne into his arms and carrying her away from Niles' helpless outstretched arms. He _couldn't possibly blame Maris for what had happened. He could, however, blame Donny._

Or perhaps he could blame Dr. Carroll, the psychiatrist he'd begun to see after Daphne had gotten engaged. That one despondent night in the local bar after Niles had split with Kit and Frasier had split with Faye and Martin had split with Bonnie, he and Frasier had discussed going into therapy to resolve their issues with women. Martin had dismissed the idea as ridiculous, and Frasier had seemed to fall in with that line of thinking quickly, so Niles had kept his thoughts to himself. But the idea had persisted, the idea that the depression that had been plaguing him ever since Daphne and Donny got involved wasn't healthy - the idea that his first impulse upon watching them get engaged, that of retrieving a paring knife from the kitchen and quietly slitting his wrists in Frasier's bathroom, was indicative of greater distress than he ought to be feeling. So he had gone into therapy. He'd kept it quiet from everyone, but he'd kept going for a good while, until he was well into his relationship with Mel. And what had happened had been, in a sense, Dr. Carroll's fault.

For Dr. Carroll had taken a novel approach to Niles' despair upon Daphne's engagement, one Niles would never have allowed himself to take on his own. Rather than trying to ascertain why Niles felt so strongly for Daphne, rather than trying to find ways to avert his despair, Dr. Carroll quite simply called into question the validity of those emotions. Do you really love her? he'd asked, early on. Of course I do, Niles had answered sharply. Dr. Carroll had folded his hands in front of him.

Explain.

Niles had tried to explain, tried to tell how the scent of her hair made his knees weaken, how the sound of her laughter made him forget that there was anyone or anything else in the world. Dr. Carroll drummed his fingers together.

Cliches, all, he said tersely.

Niles was stunned into silence. Dr. Carroll watched him carefully.

I don't understand, Niles had said finally. What do you want me to say?

Dr. Carroll leaned forward suddenly. I want you to examine this from a fresh perspective, he'd said. I want you to stop enumerating this Daphne's goddess-like qualities and start examining the world around her. Why would you have fallen in love with her so deeply? Take away the scent of her hair and the sound of her laugh and she sounds like a fairly ordinary woman.

She's not! She's –

Yes, you've told me what she is. And she's also engaged.

Why are you doing this? Niles managed to ask at last. Where do you think you're going with this?

I'm sorry, Dr. Carroll said, not sounding at all sorry. Perhaps I've been speaking too harshly.

Yes.

I'm merely wondering whether your passionate fantasies regarding this woman might not be so much centered around her as –

Yes? --Damn it, don't stop there, he was thinking.

Perhaps it's more a reaction to something else. Something you've hidden from yourself, all these years, with the smokescreen of your so-called love for Daphne.

There was a long, trembling moment of silence.

I don't have to listen to this, Niles said finally.

It's not an accusation.

I don't care. I don't want to hear it.

Dr. Carroll leaned even farther forward; for a moment Niles was afraid he was going to topple, before he saw him balance himself on the desktop with his elbows. Why not? Dr. Carroll asked.

More silence.

I don't know, Niles said finally. I don't even know what you mean. You think I imagined I was in love with Daphne because I was trying to hide something from myself?

It's a theory. Rather an unfinished one.

I should say so. What on earth could I possibly hide from myself that way, even if I wanted to?

Oh, many things. An imaginative attachment that strong can cloud a great many emotions. True love will do it as well. In drawing the focus away from the rest of your emotions you render yourself less capable of addressing them. Thus, whenever you start to feel yourself approaching an idea or thought process you don't wish you deal with, your attention shifts abruptly back to the object of the obsession. Elementary diversion, really, but it does the job.

And an elementary theory, if you'll pardon my saying so.

Do you think its simplicity invalidates it?

I wouldn't know. It's your theory.

I don't think hostility is productive in this environment.

Niles laughed aloud, remembering how many times he'd said similar things to patients who annoyed him.

What is it?

Nothing. I just realized how annoying therapy is, from this end.

Dr. Carroll smiled a little. Probably an instructive experience.

Yes. You must have a breakdown and experience it for yourself.

Dr. Carroll's smile thinned and then faded out entirely. Yes, well, he said.

Their session ended there so they didn't push any further that day, which was probably just as well. However, they continued in that line in following sessions, and though Niles remained bewildered for quite some time as to what, precisely, Dr. Carroll was getting at, there came a day when Dr. Carroll was just a little too frank and it all came clear. Niles could see, then, the point of all the circumlocution. He wanted to punch the man in the mouth.

You think I'm *gay?* he cried, nearly spitting in his fury.

Dr. Carroll instinctively wheeled his chair back a few inches. Please calm down. I didn't say that.

You insinuated it! It's what you've been insinuating all along!

What did I say that was so –

You know what you said. The idea that I fixated on Daphne in order to give myself – I don't even remember what the phrase was, a single overriding passion to distract myself from my true attractions – you think I invented an obsession with Daphne to hide that I really wanted men? That makes no sense – you are an absolute sham, Dr. Carroll, and a monumentally poor psychiatrist.

Dr. Carroll's lips curved up slightly. Methinks the gentleman doth – he began mildly.

Niles cut him off. I don't give a damn! For God's sake, do you think you're the first person to come up with that theory? Did you believe your genius stretched so far that you were the first one to have spotted it? All my life I've been fending off comments, trying to convince people I'm straight –

And why have you done that?

Because I am straight! Niles nearly howled.

Dr. Carroll leaned back in his chair, and they could both hear his unspoken words. Suit yourself, they said.

On the heels of that: Yeah, right.

Eventually Niles got up. Your reputation led me to believe that you were capable of looking beyond the obvious, he said. Apparently, your reputation was misleading. He walked out.

Niles spent the rest of that afternoon finding himself a new therapist. However, what Dr. Carroll had said stayed with him. And even as he sat through much more congenial therapy sessions with his new therapist, who addressed the issue of his love for Daphne as if it were what it seemed to be and who never came close to mentioning the word homosexuality, the thought stayed with him. It began to recur more and more frequently, showing up several in his dreams, and the disturbing part about it was that he wasn't sure how he felt about it. The dreams were exciting, raw and dirty; he'd wake up sweating and breathing hard, throbbing with an unnamed agitation. His waking thoughts were more confused – but in their very confusion there was a thrill, a surge of adrenaline as he contemplated that side of desire he'd never known. He'd spent so many years adamantly declaring his heterosexuality, and it had almost never occurred to him to question it. However, the key word there was almost. Was there an element of repression in his staunch denials? Might he be – certainly not gay, but might he be bisexual?

Would sleeping with a man enable him to forget Daphne?

The thought tormented him for weeks, and eventually he said to hell with it, downed two Scotches and went out to find a gay bar. The problem was that he had no idea where he might find one. Driving a little too fast on the rain-slickened roads lest he change his mind, he cruised the streets aimlessly for the better part of an hour before giving up and pulling over. Noticing he'd pulled up outside a Barnes and Noble, he went in – it beat sitting in the car – and, naturally, found himself in the gay/lesbian section before long. He was flipping through books aimlessly (Out for Good, now there was a nice firm title; One in 10, now, honestly, had no one yet recognized the invalidity of the Kinsey studies?; Assuming the Position – The True Story of a Male Prostitute in New York City, ugh!) when he came across, unexpectedly, the Damron Gay Travel Guide, Men's Edition. Seattle. Thumbing through it, he quickly found names and addresses for dozens of gay bars in the area. Well, this was it. Taking a pen from his pocket, he tore the blank frontispiece from the book and wrote down the address of the closest one – he was not going to be seen buying this, and it wasn't as if he'd damaged the book severely, they could still sell it. Tucking the piece of paper in his pocket, he went back out to his car.

And went to the bar. And sat stiff, tense, ready to flee the second things got weird. No one took any notice of him at first, as he bought drink after drink, trying to loosen up and convince himself this was the right thing to do. He was about to give up and go home – there was simply no way he could ever even begin flirting with a man, not with no practice whatsoever – when one of them approached him. A man somewhat bigger than Niles, goodlooking in an odd way, with a five o'clock shadow Niles had always assumed was incongruous with homosexuality and strange green-gray eyes the color of seawater. They got to talking. Niles was surprised at how easily he slipped into the conversation. Perhaps it was because he'd had no less than seven drinks. He couldn't remember what they'd talked about the next morning; all he knew was that the man's name was Aaron and that his father had, years ago, offered to hire him the best (female) whore in the city if it would turn him straight. It hadn't worked, obviously, Aaron said with a laugh, and waited expectantly for Niles' coming out story. Perhaps this is how one makes conversation in a gay bar, Niles thought, as he fumbled his way through a made-up story, too ashamed to admit he'd never actually been with a man. He wasn't too drunk to be amused by the inversion, that here in this place he was embarrassed to admit he was straight.

He went through a few more drinks and they went back to Aaron's place and there was nothing more to be said or thought about that.

He'd felt strange for days, even weeks afterward - long after he'd woken up the next morning and realized what he'd done, with a hangover slamming through his skull and his mouth tasting of incipient gingivitis and something much fouler. He'd crept out that morning without waking the man who slept beside him, had walked all the way back to his car – some two miles – rather than wake Aaron and ask for a ride. He'd told no one, ever. He couldn't. Even if he could have somehow gotten the words out that would have conveyed that he had slept with a man, he couldn't possibly have managed to force out the obligatory lie, that it was a complete mistake and he now knew he was completely straight. Still less could he have admitted that he'd enjoyed it, that one time - that he now found himself in some strange shadowy ambivalent region between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Remembering a book in Barnes and Noble entitled Bisexual Spaces, he almost went back and bought it, but stopped himself in the end, knowing he could never bring himself to face the cashier. The sad part was knowing that he'd have bought it without a qualm if it had been research for a case, a purchase for a patient. He couldn't escape the feeling that the cashier's eyes would see through him and brand him with a rainbow flag.

So he told no one, and eventually he made himself forget it. The man's face was becoming difficult to remember, the seawater eyes the only distinguishing mark that stood out clearly in his mind. The experience itself was even hazier, alcohol-muddied. It had all been just one night, one forgettable night. And now he had AIDS. 

It was the first time he'd thought the words. Now I have AIDS, he thought again, probing. Trying them on for size.

It didn't seem to mean anything just at present. Doubtless it would, eventually.

Well, he still had to have a blood test done. He'd do that tomorrow. First thing in the morning, he'd go to the hospital and have that done.

And he was going to have to tell Daphne. But – no. His mind shrank away from that one.

He could possibly deal with having been stupid and careless enough to contract AIDS himself. He could possibly live and die with that knowledge.

He could not live with the knowledge of having infected Daphne.

__

I don't have to, he said to himself, speaking firmly in his mind. _I don't know for sure yet. I will have the test done. Until then there is no point in telling her anything._

__

How am I going to tell Daphne?

There's no need to tell her anything.

How am I going to tell Daphne?

Shut up.


	5. Chapter 5

Daphne, not being a fool, was aware that something was wrong with Niles in the next few days, as he sat around the house and kneaded his hands together and stared sightlessly into space and occasionally pulled her close, hugged her fiercely, possessively. One time he managed to inhale a bit of her hair, leading to some coughing and wheezing (and a subsequent hair washing) which Daphne found amusing, once it was over, but which didn't seem to amuse Niles at all. Nothing seemed to amuse him these days. And he wouldn't make love to her, which - even over the course of a mere three days - was strange enough to make her sure something was wrong. But he wouldn't tell her what it was. "It's nothing," he'd say, avoiding her gaze. "Don't worry about me. I'm fine."  
  
But he wasn't fine, that much was perfectly clear to her, and it troubled her even more that he wouldn't talk to her about it. He'd always shared everything with her - well, perhaps not everything, that would have been impossible, but everything significant. And there were times when it had been hard for him. There had been that conversation that had been a turning point for both of them, when he told her he wasn't good enough for a goddess like her and she told him in no uncertain terms that she was no goddess and that it scared her that he thought about her that way. The conversation - this one took place in merciful darkness - when he fretted, out loud for the first time, that he was an inadequate lover and he'd never be able to satisfy her. The joint conversations, in those first few awful- transcendent days after they'd first gotten together, when they worried together about what they'd done to Donny and Mel - the conversations where they'd each worried the other was considering going back to the jilted spouse. And other things. That young patient of his who'd committed suicide a few months back, Niles had been broken up about that, and Daphne had been the only person he'd talk to about it. And then there were the trivial worries that were elevated to grand catastrophes in Niles' mind. Losing the wine club presidency to Frasier, again. Losing that Turkish prayer rug (he'd been yearning for another one ever since Roz ruined the first one he'd bought) at auction. All the tragedies, great and small, of his life. And he'd never hidden anything from Daphne. Until now.  
  
After a few tentative attempts to get him to open up, all of which were rebuffed shortly, Daphne gave up and concluded that he'd probably tell her what was wrong, in time, and that there was no sense worrying. When the time was right, he'd open up.  
  
She was right. And by then, the tardiness of the revelation was the last thing she had to worry about.  
  
She watched him, puzzled and then troubled, as his lips stumbled and stuttered over the words he was having such trouble finding. A blood test, she understood that, but why was he having it done? What -  
  
He said the word AIDS and it all began to make sense. Barely. If she let it.  
  
"AIDS," she repeated, looking at him quizzically. He couldn't look at her by then. She didn't quite understand why.  
  
"I don't understand, Niles. Is this for a patient of yours? Why are you so upset?"  
  
"No!" he cried, much too loudly, standing up and immediately sitting back down. She'd never seen him so agitated. "Daphne, I -" Good God, he was nearly crying. She stood up instinctively, to cross the room and take him in her arms, but he waved her back down. "I'm trying to tell you, Daphne - this - this isn't about anyone else. This is about me." A long, tortuous beat. "And you."  
  
"You," she said slowly. "And me?"  
  
"Yes." There was nothing left in his face of panic - nothing but pure, stark horror. "I have AIDS, Daphne. I have HIV."  
  
Silence.  
  
"And you." He got that far before he had to bury his face in his hands, shaking. "You." he tried again. Couldn't manage it.  
  
"I have it too," she finished simply. Both of them were grateful for the initial shock. Both knew he could never have gotten the words out.  
  
"I don't know," he said, and now the tears were coming in a flood. "It isn't certain. it's possible that. but you'll have to be tested and oh my God Daphne *I am so sorry!*" He was sobbing outright by now. She crossed the room, stroked his shoulder gently but absentmindedly, and waited for it to sink in. There was a long pause, punctuated only by Niles' brief, tortured sobs.  
  
"But. I don't." she said finally, struggling to find words to stem the tide of terror that threatened to engulf her. AIDS, she thought, and shivered so convulsively that it rocked Niles. "I don't understand," she said, clearing her throat finally. "How would you know this?"  
  
"I told you. I had a blood test done."  
  
"I know, but oh, my God, Niles, are you already - feeling sick?!"  
  
"No, no," he said, wiping at his eyes. "I - er. Someone - told me."  
  
"Who could possibly have told you?!"  
  
"It was - ahem," he said, as if clearing his throat would make things any easier. "It was Mel," he managed finally.  
  
"*Mel?!*"  
  
"Um. Yes."  
  
"But how would Mel - oh, my God." she said finally, falling back against the couch. "You mean she - you mean you -"  
  
"She is - infected as well."  
  
"No. No! It wasn't enough for her to make your life a living hell for months on end, she had to -" Daphne began, voice rising in defensive outrage.  
  
"No! Daphne, no," Niles said, raising a hand to stop her. "It wasn't - I -"  
  
"What?" He heard the anger in her voice and forced the words out.  
  
"I gave it to her, Daphne. I had - I - I gave it to her," he said again, and closed his eyes. More silence.  
  
"Let me get this straight," she said eventually, and Niles opened his eyes, unable to read her tone. "You have had HIV since before you began dating Mel; you infected her with it." He nodded, noticing that she didn't include herself in that category, not yet. He was unspeakably grateful for that. "So, Niles, who else have you -" They both heard the fury bubbling up in her voice; he closed his eyes again, with the complete apathy of a man who is living his oft-anticipated worst nightmare and finding it exactly as he expected, as she fought to quell the anger. "Anyone else?" she said finally.  
  
"No. No one else."  
  
"You're sure."  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Just Mel?"  
  
And you. "Just Mel."  
  
"How is she?" Daphne asked, after a pause.  
  
He opened his eyes in surprise. "What?"  
  
"Mel. The woman you - Mel. Your ex-wife. How is she?"  
  
"I - Daphne, I don't think we should be talking about this right now."  
  
"Why not? I'm concerned about her."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"You just said she has AIDS, Niles! She may be a pain but she didn't deserve that!"  
  
"All right, all right. I don't know how she is."  
  
"How was she when you talked to her?"  
  
"Er. Not so good."  
  
"What do you mean, not so good?"  
  
"Daphne, this doesn't matter right now! I've just told you -"  
  
"I know what you told me and it does matter! She was your wife!"  
  
"I just think we should be talking about -"  
  
"About what, Niles?" Her voice was rising, her breathing speeding up, and he realized with a sickening sensation that he should have answered any questions she had about Mel or anything else, if it would have postponed this confrontation. "About what you just told me? About how you have AIDS and now I have it too? About how you've killed me, Niles, that's what that is, how you've killed me in slow motion? About how I'm probably never going to see my fiftieth birthday and maybe I won't make my fortieth? About how we're never going to have children, not unless we want them to have AIDS too and die before they're four, about how I thought I had the best part of my life ahead of me and now it turns out I have nothing! Is that what you want to talk about?" She was screaming. He was crying. They both listened to the echo of her last few words. Rattling against the pull-chains on the fan.  
  
That was the end of the conversation. There were no more words left.  
  
Eventually Daphne, who had sunk into an antique rocking chair, drained by her tirade, stood up again. She opened her mouth as if to say something, then shook her head and left the room. He sat there, still crying silently, staring at his reflection in the glass top of the coffee table. She poked her head back in briefly.  
  
"How is Mel?"  
  
He swiveled his head towards her. "What?"  
  
"How is she."  
  
He was too exhausted to lie to her. "After she called me to tell me about the blood test she took an overdose of Valium."  
  
She was watching him carefully, seemingly unsurprised by the information. "Is she going to be all right?"  
  
"I think so. The paramedics should have gotten there in time. And there's been nothing in the obituaries."  
  
"So where is she now?"  
  
"Probably the psych ward at the hospital, that would be standard procedure for a suicide attempt."  
  
"Mel. In a mental hospital?"  
  
"I suspect so." He closed his eyes again. There was a brief moment of accusing silence.  
  
"Have you visited her?" Daphne asked eventually.  
  
"No. Why?"  
  
More silence. "No reason," she said eventually. There was a pause, in which he thought she'd left, till she spoke again. "You know - you can be quite a weak son of a bitch, Niles."  
  
He struggled to say "I know." The words didn't quite make it. He nodded a little.  
  
"Goodbye," she said, and that time she left. He waited a second.  
  
"I can't believe you're thinking about her at a time like this," he called after her finally, unable to bear the weight of that final reprimand. How could anyone think about anybody else when they'd just been diagnosed with AIDS? How could she possibly fault him for neglecting Mel at a time like this?  
  
"Well, I guess that puts me one up on you, then, doesn't it?" she called back, and he could hear her getting her coat and purse.  
  
"Where are you going?"  
  
"Out."  
  
"I think you should stay here now, Daphne. You haven't processed -"  
  
"I will process -" spitting out the word - "much better away from here. Away from you."  
  
"But you'll need to talk -"  
  
"Maybe I'll go and visit Mel. She and I should have a lot to talk about." And slam went the door.  
  
For a second he resumed staring sightlessly at the glass surface of the coffee table. Then his focus shifted, and he became aware of the image of his face, staring out at him from the glass. He watched as one tear, nearly invisible in the reflection, made its crooked path down his cheek. Looking at himself. The light from the overhead lamp seemed to change, growing murkier, dimmer, and yet somehow his face stood out in clearer resolution. He studied himself for an infinite moment.  
  
He broke just as a second tear was dropping off his chin. With one incoherent cry, he leapt forward and smashed the glass. His reflection shivered into oblivion as the pieces flew every which way. A largish piece speared his big toe, sending up a brief fountain of blood. Health hazard, that blood was now.  
  
Ignoring it, he stretched out full-length on the couch, burying his face in the pillow, his tears beating hard and fast into the material, spurting like the blood with each of his heartbeats. He lay there and cried and prayed that when the time came for him to rise, the world would have vanished. 


	6. Chapter 6

Daphne came home late that night to find Niles lying in bed, lights out, staring up at the ceiling. She entered the room softly. "Well," she said, standing in the doorway. She'd turned on the hall light when she came in, but her shadow, absurdly elongated, fell over Niles' face and chest. She couldn't see his face. She was no more than a black cardboard cutout to him.

"Where did you go?" he asked her, eventually, as she continued to stand there, her shadow flowing into his eyes.

"Drove around a bit," she said, entering and shutting the door behind her, so the room was plunged into darkness once more. "You know." She went to the chest of drawers and pulled open the top one, rummaging for a nightgown.

"Did you go see Mel?"

She shook her head. "I thought about it, but I couldn't." He felt a thin, bitter surge of vindication when she said that. He swallowed heavily against it, as though it were bile. "I didn't think she'd want to see me anyway."

"Probably not now," he said, his tone of voice closing off the subject. She heard that and pushed it, just so as not to let him have his own way.

"I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about eventually. I don't think she wants to see anybody now, but I'll call her when she gets out of the hospital. She and I are in this together, after all."

"Daphne –" Voice tight, tortured. "Daphne, that's wrong. You and I are in this together. You and me."

"No." She closed the drawer firmly, turned to face him, though neither could see the other one. "No, you did this to me, Niles, like you did it to her. We're not –"

"I have it too, Daphne! I'm dying too!"

He ached to see her, to know if she'd wavered when he said that. But the blackness seemed to coalesce, shifting to creep up around her, twining itself up her legs, veiling her face like some sort of perverse blackened bridal garment. A shroud, that was what that was called, he thought. 

The pause went on long enough for him to begin putting the final touches on the metaphor when she spoke.

"I know that." Her tone was unreadable.

"Daphne, please –" His voice cracked. "I can't deal with this, Daphne. I can't – I can't go on hurting this way. Please don't hate me." He sounded like a third grader and he knew it. 

She stood there, indecisive.

"Please."

As if that snapped the spell, she started and strode towards the bathroom. "Don't beg with me right now, Niles. I don't have the strength for it." The door clicked shut. In a second, he heard the water in the sink begin to run.

He was lying in precisely the same position when she emerged from the bathroom in her nightgown, her day's clothing wadded in one hand. She threw them in the laundry hamper and slid into bed, pulling the covers over her but careful to keep a few feet of space between her and Niles. He turned toward her in surprise.

"I thought you'd spend the night in the guest room."

"Is that what you want?"

"Of course not."

"It wouldn't matter anyway. We christened that a few nights ago." He thought she smiled wanly. "There's nowhere I can go to get away from it, Niles."

"Do you mean get away from having –" A lump caught in his throat.

"AIDS, Niles."

"Yes, do you want to get away from that or from me?"

There was a short silence. "I don't know," she said eventually, and slid a little farther under the covers. But she was still facing him, across the expanse of two feet of linen.

He needed to say something and he had nothing to say. He found himself babbling frantically, meaninglessly. "I'm so sorry, Daphne. Please believe me, I never in a million years –"

She cut him off. "Meant for this to happen. I know. Did you think I didn't know that?"  


"I don't know! I just can't –" He fell silent.

"I know, Niles." Her hand crept across the no-man's land of linen, alighted gently on his elbow. He held himself tense, not daring to hope for more. "I know I'm being awful to you right now. I'm just – well, you know. There's so much to – oh, so much to try to take in and understand and come to terms with and I haven't even begun."

"I know. I haven't either."

"I don't want to make you the scapegoat." Then her voice hardened – subtly, but noticeably, as it had been more matter-of-fact than meltingly sympathetic to begin with. "At the same time, you did give me AIDS."

"I –" She stopped him from whimpering, not wanting to hear it. 

"Just answer me one question, Niles, because I was driving around for a long time tonight and I think I figured most of it out. I know you didn't know you had it till Mel called you tonight, and I guess you probably got it just before you got involved with her, because I know she made you do a blood test. I thought maybe you cheated on her –" he made a brief negative sound – "but I knew you wouldn't do that. Anyway, so I guess I know when you got it and how you managed to infect both me and her without catching wise, but what I don't know is how the hell you got it in the first place." He was silent. "I'll believe you when you said you gave it to Mel, that she didn't give it to you, but that means there was someone else just before her, and you never told me about anyone else. I thought we told each other everything, Niles." He tried to speak and literally could not. "If you –" She faltered there for the first time, slightly. "If you care about me at all, Niles, tell me."

He worked the lump out of his throat, but he had nothing to say. "I… I'm sorry," he said.

She lay motionless. "You won't tell me?"

"I… I…" Oh, God. "I wish I could," he said, praying she could read the sincerity in his voice.  


"Why?" Her voice was rising. "How can you tell me, now, that you're going to hold this back? Do you know what this means, do you know what this has done to us? Now is not the time to start with the secrets game!"

"I know and I'm sorry but I can't! I just – oh, God." He resisted the urge to pull the blanket up over his face.

She said nothing. Both of them knew the ball was in his court.

"Another time," he made himself say. "It's just – not now. I can't, now."

She sighed. "You're just working at driving that wedge between us, aren't you, Niles? One thing after another." There was a pause. "When I came in here, I think I had the idea that we could work this out, over time. Maybe. That we'd be facing it together. Now –" She sighed again, more deeply, a sound so unconscious it escaped melodrama. "I don't know anymore, Niles. I can't do this if you won't talk to me."

A reply would have been appropriate there, and he longed to give one. To be able to wrap this night, at least, up in a neat package. Save the bows and adornments for later, but just for now, there ought to be some conclusion to this. A chapter ending. The idea that things might go on this way, that each night might end just this way, loose and rambling and pointless, terrified him.

He didn't have the words to make the closure, though. Eventually she turned her back to him. In time she fell asleep.

He didn't. He lay awake, watchful, hearing the steady undulation of her breathing. It put him in mind of waves crashing on a shore, and from there – he hadn't changed fundamentally, of course; the literary dilettante still held strong in his soul – to contemplation of Matthew Arnold. "…the world, which seemed/ To lie before us like a land of dreams, /So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;/ And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night."

He murmured the lines softly to himself, as Daphne's breathing continued to imitate the soft slow dirge of the tide on the shore. Leaving out the part about "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!"

His eyes eventually began to burn with fatigue as he lay there, but he couldn't allow himself to sleep. Instead, he mapped it out in his mind, all the confusion and the hurt, all the terror and the pain. He listened to her breathing and tried to hear the sound of what she'd lost in the rhythm. And through it all he kept gauging within himself. Can I stand it now? …no, I can deal with this. I am dying, Daphne is dying. Can I stand it now? …It hurts like hell but what can I do? I have to stick it out. Daphne lying there, facing me woodenly, telling me we're falling apart. I can't take it, no, I can't take it, but what else can I do? I can take it because I have to be able to take it. Daphne withering away, struck by hepatitis or pneumonia or the common cold. Daphne's eyes trained on him, eyes saying _please help me_, and then, worse, _you did this to me. _Daphne sprawled out as Mel had been sprawled out, an empty prescription bottle on the nightstand. Daphne, always Daphne, Daphne dying of AIDS, Daphne dying of the disease which he had given her –

It was almost morning when he came to the calm conclusion that he couldn't stand it anymore. He rose, slowly, so the bedsprings wouldn't rebound and she wouldn't awaken. He dressed quickly, for once paying no attention to what he put on, and left the room. He grabbed his coat and wallet and would have walked straight out the door, but turned back reluctantly to find a pen and a piece of paper. He wrote quickly, briefly, not allowing himself time to think about what he was doing. And he left.

She found his note for her there on the table when she got up in the morning. 

__

Daphne, my love,

The fact that I call you "my love" is no accident but I have to leave. Perhaps I have to leave because I love you. All I know is that I can't stand to stay here and watch the hatred growing in your eyes. I understand that this is unforgivable, but what I've done to you already is unforgivable, and I can't stand to watch it any longer.

I am sorry for all of this.

Love always, 

Niles

She read the note perhaps a dozen times in the heatless orange fire of early-morning sunlight.

She recognized the shock from yesterday morning. Yesterday, she had wanted it to pass. On some level no more refined than instinct, she'd needed to feel. This time, she hoped the shock stayed with her till she died. Which, doubtless, would not be a very long time.

As she reread it for the twelfth or thirteenth time her eyes halted on the sentence in the middle. "I can't watch the hatred growing in your eyes."

"Wanted to do it all in one shot, hmm, Niles?" she murmured. The paper fell from her nerveless fingers.

She sat on the couch and stared at the broken glass all over the floor. It was all going to sink in sooner or later, she knew. But perhaps if she didn't move… perhaps if she stayed exactly like this… perhaps the numbness would remain…

Her lips trembled slightly. Raising her eyes from the glass, she stared straight ahead. Her fingers curled convulsively around the edge of a pillow.

The piece of paper on the floor shivered and lifted slightly, stirred by the air from the ceiling fan.


	7. Chapter 7

Of course the shock couldn't last forever, much as she might have wished it. Yet even as she paced the apartment with dilated eyes and trembling hands, even as she placed the letter in the stainless-steel sink in the kitchen and touched the lit match to one corner, watching the flames lick up and consume it with surprising swiftness - even as, moments later, she hurled a harmless crystal knick-knack she'd picked up the other day at the wall, watching it shatter with one sharp noise before the pieces sank soundlessly into the rug - there was a sort of detachment to it all. Because this couldn't be about her, really, could it? It couldn't be she, Daphne Moon, the endearing British sweetheart with the soft accent and the devoted almost-fiance? It couldn't be she who'd been condemned to death this way, by some indiscretion in said almost-fiance's past, by a tiny virus multiplying quickly but passively in her veins even now? This couldn't have anything to do with her. People like her didn't get AIDS. It was a gay disease, wasn't it? How could this happen?  
  
The feeling of detachment stayed with her, even as she picked up the phone and dialed Frasier's number and heard herself demanding loudly, too loudly, to know where Niles had gone. She drew Martin instead of Frasier, something she failed to notice in her agitation, and managed to alarm him thoroughly before he consented to pass the phone to Frasier (interrupting him in the middle of a bubble bath, she gathered from the heated conversation just before Frasier took the phone - how could he be bathing at a time like this?)  
  
The answer to that last question was simple: Frasier had no idea anything was wrong. Apparently, for the first time in his life, Niles had not consulted him on the brink of making a major life decision, had not confided in him when he found himself confronted with a major problem. Frasier quite clearly had no idea that Niles had HIV, and so of course had no idea what Daphne was talking about. When she realized this, when she realized that her loud pressured speech was on the verge of giving her away, she stammered something about having something in the oven, hung up, and pulled the phone cord out of the wall. She couldn't let him know what was wrong and she didn't know why. Perhaps telling him would have made it seem too real, would have shattered the detachment that enabled her to watch her own ongoing crackup coolly and dispassionately from some remote corner of her mind.  
  
She watched it. She watched her hands shaking as they held the detached phone cord, watched those hands fling the cord as far as it would go, before it was reined it by its own length and rebounded a few inches before falling to the floor. She watched her feet begin to move again, first pacing around the apartment, then pacing a little faster, then faster still, till she was practically running in circles around the smashed coffee table under the fan, feet crunching on the glass. She felt her face begin to crumple and she tried to step a little further outside herself to watch, as the tears began streaming down her cheeks and she slid bonelessly into the cushions of the sofa, scrunching her hands against her face to try to quell the sobs. She pressed her face against the smooth material of the sofa back, so cool against her hot skin, as the tears flowed faster and she began to lose the detachment. "Oh, no, no, please," she murmured, breath hitching over her sobs, and whether she meant the AIDS or Niles' departure or the fact that she was starting to feel it all she couldn't have said.  
  
The doorbell rang, making her jump. Quickly, she realized it had to be Frasier and Martin, coming to make sure she was okay. But since she absolutely wasn't, she couldn't let them in, couldn't face them now. She ached for their presence, for Frasier's fraternal embrace, for Martin's awkward pats on her shoulder. But she could never have gotten the words out that would have explained what was wrong. Could never have said: Niles left me. Could never have said: I have AIDS. These were impossible words, so instead of going to answer the door she jumped up, crunching more glass beneath her feet, and ran for the bedroom. There she hid, curled under three blankets, cowering away from Niles' side of the bed, until the doorbell stopped ringing. There she stayed for a good long time.  
  
But of course our lass Daphne is a practical soul, not given to nurturing such hysteria for very long. It did last the rest of that day, a day which she could only partially recall later. More pacing, more crying, more screaming, a burned dinner, a very long shower. When she dropped off to sleep that night she was completely exhausted, and when she woke the following day it was past noon and she was due at the Cranes' for a physical therapy session in an hour.  
  
She lay there a long time, staring up at the ceiling, thinking it all through. She was able to think more or less clearly now, which was a welcome change. Not that there was really very much to think through. Just a sort of refrain, running through her head, which she tried to grasp and pull into herself: I have AIDS. I am dying. I have AIDS. I am dying. There were no tears now, just a forlorn attempt to accept the inevitable: I am dying. I am dying.  
  
I am dying alone, the refrain varied once, and she winced, bit the inside of her cheek. The blood she tasted did nothing to soothe her nerves. No, she wasn't ready for that yet. She went back to pondering what it meant simply to be dying. That didn't seem to make her head buzz that way, didn't start her furiously blinking back tears.  
  
Eventually she glanced at the clock and noticed she had to be at the Cranes' in ten minutes. She stood and began to dress mechanically, with no question as to whether or not she would go. Of course she had to go. She had to Keep Up Appearances. She knew she wouldn't tell them what had happened today. It was still too fresh for that. She wondered if it would ever get any better. She wondered if she would ever tell them. She walked out of the house in clean clothes but without having set foot inside the bathroom; halfway there in the car she recollected herself, popped a mint in her mouth and ran her fingers through her hair.  
  
Of course Frasier and Martin knew something was wrong, but they knew better than to question her, and Daphne was not forthcoming. She went through Martin's exercises mechanically, her mind clearly elsewhere, rumpled hair hanging in her face. They watched her with puzzled eyes, certain she'd open up to them eventually. She'd never been the secretive sort before.  
  
If she keeps on this way I think I'm going to call Niles and find out what's going on, Frasier thought.  
  
I bet all this has something to do with Niles, Martin thought.  
  
What Daphne was thinking nobody knew.  
  
She finished Martin's exercises with precisely the same abstraction with which she'd begun them. Throwing a casual goodbye over her shoulder, she went to leave the apartment. Frasier stopped her. "Oh, Daphne," he said hurriedly, mainly just to keep her there a moment longer, "what are you doing this afternoon?"  
  
"Oh," she said, stopping, her eyes focusing in on him a little. "Yes, that is a puzzle, isn't it?" she said, sounding genuinely puzzled and not much else. She came back in and sat on the couch. They watched her wordlessly. "Hmmm," she said. Then, suddenly, her features resolved, cleared, and she almost smiled. "Actually," she said, "good thing you asked. I think what I need to do today is to find meself a new car."  
  
They stared. She smiled brightly.  
  
"Daphne, what -" Frasier began.  
  
She waved him off, with a sunny, hard grin. "I'll see you two boys later. Those dealerships aren't open all hours, you know!" And she was gone.  
  
Frasier and Martin looked at one another.  
  
"What the hell was that?" Martin asked. 


	8. Chapter 8

As the weeks went on, Daphne seemed, to the people in her life, to have rebounded. More precisely, she seemed to have overshot. There was a feverish, manic excitement about her all the time, as she rushed from one place to the next. Mostly from one shopping expedition to the next.  
  
For Daphne had made an important discovery. Money was not going to buy her the rest of her life, but it could sure as hell buy her happiness for whatever time she had left. Or so it seemed. With thirty-five years' worth of frugality ingrained in her, it was a swift, heady rush when she realized that she could run up all the bills she wanted. Again, so it seemed. She was dying, wasn't she? Lord knew how much time she had left, especially since (she had a little nagging twinge of conscience about this every now and then) she couldn't bring herself to see a doctor. What difference was it going to make, anyway? It wasn't as if they had a cure. And if they could extend her life significantly, what would that do? She'd spend ten years dying. Who wanted that?  
  
No, it seemed perfectly clear that all she really had to look forward to was a few months. And if that was true, then what difference on earth could it possibly make if she racked up some unpayable VISA bills?  
  
You can't put a car on plastic, of course, so she paid the hefty down payment and the first month's payment out of the joint savings account she and Niles had shared. Taking "shared" in a very loose sense. Of course nine-tenths of what was in there had originally come from Niles and not from her. But, she rationalized, she and Niles had discussed getting her a new car, and that was of course where the money would have come from. Granted, they hadn't really been talking about buying her a brand-new fire- red Corvette convertible. But so what? A car's a car. And that one was quite a good model. Not to mention seriously sexy.  
  
The car was only the beginning. Daphne was discovering that a no-holds- barred shopping spree could be just the thing when reality began to encroach a little too far. And with a VISA with no credit limit (gotten new when she and Niles had combined their bank accounts) and a taste for the expensive that she'd resolutely been denying all these years, she set about indulging herself.  
  
She didn't go halfway. She needed to redecorate the apartment, that was a definite - she couldn't bear living in the atmosphere she and Niles had created any longer. By all rights, she should have found a new apartment, but the market was tight just then. And of course she wanted a new wardrobe. Her old things really were dreadfully tatty. And shoes, well, of course she needed new shoes to go with the new clothes, but in the end, wasn't shopping for shoes an end in and of itself? And then there were new appliances to buy - the coffeemaker, of course that was too reminiscient of Niles, and who knew what wonders could be discovered when you browsed casually through the appliances in Sears? Breadmakers and pastamakers and all sorts of things to make the cooking which the Crane men ridiculed automated. And a new TV. And a new VCR, and a DVD player. And decorative scented soaps for the bathroom. And teddy bears and other stuffed animals - mostly Gund. And.  
  
The list went on, but her favorite item was always clothing. Clothing and shoes. She'd been eating like a horse of late, mostly rich chocolate desserts with about ninety-six grams of fat each; but it hadn't started to show, and when it did, well, she figured there were times when a high thyroid level could be an advantage. That would be dangerous, of course, but what was the worst it could do to her? Kill her?  
  
So she went on buying pile after pile of new clothing, and looking - with the aid of a new hundred-dollar-haircut - better than she'd ever looked in her life. This had the unpleasant side effect of attracting a lot of male attention, which she was in no state to deal with at that point - no relationship could ever be consummated anyway, so what was the point? Was she going to find herself a serious boyfriend only to inform him that it wasn't to go beyond hand-holding? However, on the whole she was pleased with how good she was looking, and all the things she was accruing. It made her feel a little safer. She went right on shopping.  
  
She was in Neiman-Marcus ringing up a three-hundred dollar purchase when she ran into Mel. Actually, she was intent on her purchases, savoring the usual heady rush of having acquired more stuff, when she was startled by a light tap on her elbow. She froze upon seeing who it was, unsure what to do. She had no idea how Mel felt about her at this point, and even less of an idea how she felt about Mel. She'd been accustomed to detesting her for so long that it was difficult to shift all her opinions around, even if she had done so seemingly effortlessly when Niles had first broken the news; that apparent sense of comradery had been, she now realized, born less of any real desire to befriend Mel than of the fact that Niles clearly wanted to forget all about her. But he wasn't around anymore, and she felt no urge to spite his absent image.  
  
At the same time, what she'd said to Niles that last night - "she and I are in this together" - hadn't been totally off the mark, either. The best emotion she could summon for this woman just now seemed to be an unexpected surge of pity; but it was real and true, and it kept her from blowing her off.  
  
While she'd been pondering all this, she'd missed something Mel had said. Asking for a repetition, she discovered it had just been her name. She nodded and realized she was making a distinctly vacuous impression. She cleared her throat, grabbed the bag the clerk had just handed her, and tried to put herself together.  
  
"Well," she said, and realized that didn't do much to diminish the impression of vacuity. Grasping after words, finding them suddenly slippery, she ended up blurting out the first thing that came to her tongue - "This is a little awkward -" which was, of course, wrong. Then again, this was awkward. Mel simply nodded, leaving that where it was. At least she didn't seem annoyed.  
  
The customer next in line tapped Daphne's shoulder gingerly. Jumping again, she got out of the line. The register began clicking again.  
  
"Well!" Mel said, with that little breathy inflection of hers, as she looked Daphne up and down, eyes lingering for a moment over the sales bag. "I didn't expect to run into you here."  
  
"No, I. no," Daphne said, realizing suddenly that Mel was wondering how in hell she was going to afford the purchase she'd just rung up. Since she was wondering the same thing herself, she let it pass. There was a moment of silence which would have become very awkward very quickly, had not a tall woman with ash-blond hair fading to gray breezed up just then.  
  
"Are we about done here?" she said to Mel, then faltered slightly upon seeing Daphne. "Oh, hi," she said, evidently wondering who Daphne was. Mel intervened.  
  
"Um, Daphne," she said, "This is Kyra Malone, my - er - roommate. Kyra, this is Daphne Moon."  
  
Daphne was too hung up on "my - er - roommate" to notice that this Kyra quite clearly recognized her name. She was just deciding that the logical conclusion as to meaning of the stammer, not to mention the out-of-place college-age designation, was absurd when the conversation moved on again in another of those jerky starts.  
  
"Uh, Kyra," Mel said, "I was thinking that while you went to the bookstore like you were hoping to do, Daphne and I might get something to eat. If that's all right," she added, looking at Daphne. Daphne nodded wordlessly, impressed at how quickly Mel had been able to concoct that little scenario, since it was quite clear Kyra had previously had no intention of visiting any bookstore. She was a good sport about it - "I'll occupy myself somehow," were her exact words - and before she knew it Daphne had been more or less propelled toward the local food court, and then propelled right past it towards a ritzier-looking café sort of deal. A more upscale version of Au Bon Pain, it did not look to be the sort of place where you could get an extra-large slice of cheesecake. Daphne sighed.  
  
"So," Daphne said, once they were seated with tiny portions of light, unsatisfying food which made it clear neither of them was really interested in eating. "This isn't how I expected to be spending my afternoon." She hoped that didn't sound as nasty to Mel as it did to her.  
  
"No," Mel said, sitting forward a little. "I'm a little relieved, though. I've thought about calling you a couple of times, actually, but I. well, you know."  
  
"Yes," Daphne said, far more impressed with the beginning of the sentence than with its ending. "I'd thought about giving you a call too, I guess, at first, but I - oh, I don't know." Why was it that she suddenly found herself on the brink of blurting out some home truths? Why was it that she had to actively stop herself from saying that she'd essentially been running from it all for the past two months? She'd never gotten so far as admitting that to herself, and she was on the verge of admitting it to a woman she didn't even like.  
  
"No, it's not exactly easy to deal with," Mel said, with admirable composure. "And it's a difficult situation. If Niles hadn't - if things weren't like this I'd never want to see you again."  
  
Give her credit for honesty, anyway. To her own surprise, Daphne laughed a little. "No, I know what you mean," she said wryly. She took a sip of water. "You know, just before Niles -" she cleared her throat. "Just before he left," she said, hitting the last word too hard, "I said something to him about how we, you and I, were in this together and. what did I say?" she asked, noticing how Mel's eyes had suddenly glazed over.  
  
"Excuse me," Mel said, and coughed. "What was that about his - leaving?"  
  
"Yes," Daphne said, puzzled. "You're not going to tell me you hadn't heard." She realized with a brief flash of regret that there had been an opportunity, there, for her to act her way out of this and leave one more person with a false impression. All this unmitigated honesty was already getting to be difficult.  
  
"No, I - well, I haven't been keeping up with that sort of thing very much," Mel answered, snapping Daphne back to the conversation. "My life's changed a lot over the past few months, and I haven't really been keeping up with - I had no idea." She hesitated, clearly wanting to ask more questions, but unsure about what would be appropriate. Daphne felt an illogical twinge of that same pity again, mostly because she could sense that Mel was genuinely trying to be decent about this, and decided to make things easy on her.  
  
"He's been gone months now," she said, watching one of Mel's eyebrows lift slightly. "Since the day he got the blood results back. He told me that night and was gone by the next morning." She couldn't stand the silence that would be sure to follow there while Mel groped for the appropriate condolences, so she found herself talking even though there was nothing more to say. "I haven't heard from him since. I have no idea where he is. I don't - I don't think he's coming back, though." She pushed her chin up and made her expression very severe, telling herself that she would sooner shoot herself than be found crying in front of Mel Karnofsky in public.  
  
"I'm sorry," Mel said after a minute, which was of course standard. Less standard was "I suppose this is two things we have in common, then."  
  
Daphne looked at her. She wasn't joking. With an effort, she said "And I suppose you're pleased about it."  
  
"No!" came the quick response, and just as quickly, Daphne believed her. "No. I. like I said, I've moved on in a lot of ways. And after what he's already done to both of us, the last thing I would wish is for him to do anything more to you."  
  
Daphne set down her fork with a small clink. "It all does come back to him, doesn't it?" she said, and sighed. "Sometimes I don't think it's right to hate him this much. But when you think about what he actually did -"  
  
"Anything that gets you through it," Mel said, taking a sip of her own water.  
  
"How can you be that way about it?" Daphne asked, before she could help it. "How can you be so calm? Half the time I want to strangle someone, and the other half -" She stopped, not ready to touch on the subject of her shopping. The other half the time she spent money frantically, living for the high it gave her.  
  
"I don't feel like I'm any 'way' about it," Mel said after a pause, and something about the way her eyes cut away when she said that made Daphne feel certain she did have an answer and was withholding it. She remembered the bit about her "roommate," and wondered, with a surreal sort of antilogic that seemed to fit well with this surreal sort of day, whether Mel hadn't found both happiness and a new kind of serenity with this Kyra woman. Not that it's any of my business, she thought, and put the idea away. "I'm just trying to get through this. Day by day. You know the cliches."  
  
"They don't help much," Daphne said, more bitterly than she would have liked. There was a sudden hot prickle of tears behind her eyes, and she blinked furiously and grabbed for her napkin, stabbing it at her eyes. "This is weird," she said, just to be talking. "Talking to you this way. How does that work, anyway? We haven't exactly had the smoothest of relationships."  
  
"No," Mel answered, fiddling with her own napkin, "but." There was another pause, and Daphne wondered which of them would be the first to say the word AIDS. There was no other answer for any of this, of course, and neither one was saying it. "Of course there's a sort of bond," she finished, lamely. "I can't exactly be angry with you now for taking Niles from me, not since he's left you, and anyway I've found someone else. Besides," she said, quickly enough that it was clear she was trying to slip that "I've found someone else" in without any questions, "even if I were still pining for Niles and he were still with you, there's a sort of bond, naturally, in being -"  
  
"Yes, the two women he infected," Daphne said, saving the pause but still unable to say the dreaded four-letter word. "Hell of a reason to be sitting in an overpriced café drinking three-dollar bottles of water together."  
  
Mel laughed, a sound which startled Daphne, as she hadn't heard it before. "It is," she said, "but if you don't mind I'd rather - address some things more directly." That sounded more like her.  
  
"What things would those be?" Daphne said dryly.  
  
"Well, there are a good deal of practical things to discuss, of course -"  
  
"If you're thinking you're going to sit me down here for a nice chat about medications you can forget it."  
  
"No, of course not. Well, maybe, if that was what you wanted to discuss, but really - can't we just talk?" Mel said, and her eyes were suddenly pleading. "I can talk to Kyra about some of this but it's hard, I keep thinking she can't understand. And there's no one else. And if Niles has left you - oh, I'm sorry." She stopped, seeming to realize there was no reasonable way to restart that.  
  
Daphne sat still, thinking. This whole experience was insane. The idea that she was expected to regard Mel as a normal, decent human being would have been enough to absorb in one conversation. For her to essentially demand that they "talk" - in the sense of "bare their souls", Daphne inferred - was quite obviously sheer lunacy.  
  
But what was the alternative? she thought, letting the silence drag on. She'd go back to her apartment, cavernous now that she had it to herself, and put away all her new purchases, many of which she would never wear, likely. She would walk around touching all her new acquisitions, trying to convince herself they meant something. She'd soak in the tub for hours with a whole host of new bath products, trying to read a new book and reading the same page over and over again. She would try to ignore the fact that she was dying. And like as not she would cry herself to sleep.  
  
"In other words," she began, clearing her throat, "you want us to be friends."  
  
"Well, I don't know if I'd go that far," Mel said, sounding so honestly startled that Daphne laughed before she could help it. She kept laughing, and Mel smiled a little eventually, and when she stopped laughing she impulsively reached across and patted the hand of the woman sitting across from her. Mel looked even more startled.  
  
"Can we get out of this damn café?" Daphne asked. "The atmosphere in here is driving me crazy. Maybe we can 'talk' while I walk you to your car."  
  
"We should probably find Kyra first," Mel said, standing up and moving towards the door. "I have no idea where she'll be by now."  
  
"As long as there actually is a bookstore within ten miles of here, we should probably be okay," Daphne said, following Mel to the door. 


	9. Chapter 9

And thus a strange, uneasy relationship commenced, a relationship which might for lack of a better word have been termed friendship. Mel and Daphne were not made to be friends, their lives and their ways of thinking followed completely different paths, and neither one of them harbored any illusions about the fact that if they hadn't shared the common bond of having been mortally wounded by Niles, they would have had very little use for one another. Many of their conversations were interspersed with nervous spaces where neither could find the slightest thing to say. The Niles-centered animosity of yore had vanished entirely, and even apart from their shared trauma they found they liked one another well enough; but in a vague, disinterested sort of way. She wasn't the ideal AIDS companion, Daphne concluded wryly to herself one afternoon, but there wasn't much to do about it.  
  
The situation was made much worse by the fact that Daphne was still resolutely refusing to face up to any of this. She continued to shop as if she were sure to die tomorrow, and continued to wince away from any reference to her disease, which made the periodic visits with Mel especially painful, as Mel had clearly moved at least a little beyond that stage and recognized the importance of talking things through. Half the time their discussions were one step short of pure torture for Daphne, who spent the rest of her life working hard at forgetting the whole thing. But Mel didn't know any of that, didn't know Daphne was running away emotionally as fast as she could. She didn't know about Daphne's by-now compulsive shopping (although Daphne had a feeling she suspected; but then, everyone must by this point), didn't know that Daphne hadn't even seen a doctor yet. So she behaved, naturally enough, as if she and Daphne were indeed in the same boat. Sometimes Daphne idly wondered what Mel would do if she knew how badly Daphne was floundering. Then she would shove the thought away and go buy something else.  
  
But life was getting harder all around. The Crane men were well aware that something was going on, and it took all the brilliant artificial don't-fuck- with-me-smiles Daphne could muster to keep them from prying their way into the truth. They knew Niles had left, of course - sometimes Daphne felt that Frasier was left floating adrift as much as she had been - and asked her questions now and again about that, trying to make sure she was okay when they could see full well that she wasn't. They were naturally dying to know why he had left and what was going on and what he had said and if he was ever coming back. Daphne's smile grew even more brilliant as she tried to find a way to tell them she didn't know without saying she didn't know.  
  
And eventually she lied to them. Told them she and Niles had had a little parting of the ways, he'd gone off to sort things through, they'd agreed it would be best if there was no contact so she didn't have his address. He'd be back, she was sure, he was just sorting things through.  
  
"Where the hell did he go, a monastery?" Martin grumbled, on a repetition of this fabricated tale. Before she could help it, Daphne answered "Quite possibly," and then excused herself to the bathroom before the tears could get started.  
  
Hiding and more hiding and it was starting not to work. The questions and furtive glances she got from the Cranes alone were wearing her down. Seeing Mel was much, much worse. One time on the phone she began to concoct an excuse - she'd gotten to be very good at concocting stories of late - but then found, somehow, that she couldn't. Painful as it was, it was a relief that there was at least one person out there who knew the truth. If she backed away from that, she had the sense she would disintegrate from lack of substance.  
  
Predictably, it was in one of these not-exactly-social visits with Mel that it all unraveled. That night Kyra joined them at dinner as well, which automatically made Daphne into a third wheel; she'd confirmed over time that her assumption as to the meaning of that flimsy "roommates" excuse had been correct. Mel had explained briefly a while back that she and Kyra had been roommates in college and had had a Relationship, capital R necessary, then. They'd stayed friends over the years, though Kyra's home was in San Diego - Daphne could already see that Kyra seemed to ground Mel considerably, and it was true that Mel's company was more pleasant with Kyra around - and it had been sheer luck, bad or good depending on your perspective, that Kyra had come for a scheduled visit just days after the blood test results had come back. "She's turned everything around for me," Mel had said, and that was all she would say. Certainly it was all Daphne wanted to hear. Talking about Mel's newly rediscovered lesbian love was less awkward than talking about having AIDS, but not by much.  
  
Still, Kyra seemed a genuinely decent person, and dining with her and Mel, once you'd gotten over the shock, was no more awkward than dining with any standard heterosexual-and-in-love couple. Less awkward than with some, actually. And, since Kyra was there, the conversation had been a lot less awkward than usual regarding the subjects of AIDS and abandonment and death. Daphne was feeling a little revved up, as if she'd had two cups of coffee too many; her foot was jiggling ceaselessly against the leg of her chair all through dinner. But that was the state she was in all the time now, even when she was shopping; shopping had lost some of its narcotizing/tranquilizing effects, which scared the hell out of her when she let it. But most of the time she didn't let it, and through dinner she simply let her foot jiggle against the chair leg and tried to participate in the conversation. It was almost going well, till it all blew up.  
  
It began very simply, with Kyra checking her watch and informing Mel that they should probably hurry up if they wanted to get to the pharmacy before it closed. Daphne flinched automatically, which seemed to escape Mel's notice but not Kyra's. Instead, Mel had turned to her and was speaking to her almost earnestly. She strained to focus.  
  
"All right," she said, "I've been wanting to bring this up for awhile but it's not exactly an easy thing to say." Oh, boy, I'm getting dumped, Daphne thought mirthlessly. "I suppose the bit about the pharmacy is as good a lead-in as any." Daphne's foot began to jiggle a little more animatedly, causing her chair to vibrate unpleasantly. "It's just that I know how - well, how expensive all these medications can get - I know insurance will cover a lot of it, but down the line it won't, and even so, basic care is not enough with this disease. And I. . ."  
  
Daphne kept watching Mel's lips moving but it seemed to have become completely disconnected with the sounds that were spilling out into the air. On some level she was aware that Mel was offering either to help subsidize or else to pay entirely for Daphne's treatments, and on that same level it registered that this was a fantastically generous offer and her estimation of Mel was going to have to shoot up by about five hundred points; but above that it didn't seem to mean anything. Mel was talking about her medications and she wasn't on any, so what did this all mean? "Down the line" - down what line? Was there something coming after today? What was going on?  
  
She was blanking out and just aware of it, just aware that Mel had stopped talking and now it was her turn to say something. She tried. "No," came out - she saw Mel's eyebrows draw together and realized that it sounded like she'd refused her offer, which wasn't exactly what she meant. She tried again. "Please, no," came out that time, and then suddenly her foot's jiggling turned into one hard kick, and she was up and out of her overturned chair without consciously deciding to move. She dashed out of the restaurant without looking back, whirled into her car and screeched out of her parking spot and slammed the door several seconds later, just as Mel and Kyra and half the restaurant made it to the door to watch her departure. She hit sixty before she was out of the parking lot, eighty as soon as she got a stretch of open road ahead of her, and now she was crying, crying and driving eighty-plus miles an hour down a mostly-deserted strip of back roads, and it was because she was dying.  
  
Dying. She saw it now and was utterly incapable of bearing it. She'd said the words to herself thousands of times, had thought they'd sunk in, but obviously they hadn't at all. Now the floodgates were open, her life one giant sore, and she was crying so hard she couldn't see as it all flashed through her, the diagnosis, Niles' leaving, her own running away. She choked and gasped and sobbed it out, driving even faster now, still trying to outrun it on some level, hurting worse than she'd ever thought she could hurt. She only stopped when she ran off the road.  
  
Her tears had blinded her, and she hadn't seen the curve in the road. So she plowed straight into the guardrail, tearing it from its moorings, shearing into a patch of dense but thankfully lightweight foliage. She snapped back against the seat; then, as the car rebounded and settled unevenly against the twisted metal and the seeking branches, she laid her head against the wheel and wept.  
  
She had no idea how long she sat there like that, a thin flexible twig poking into her cheek, her vision a wash of green and gray and red. She cried till she'd developed a hell of a sinus headache, but she couldn't seem to stop, and on some level she relished these tears: they seemed to represent the first true feelings she'd had since that morning Niles left. She cried and screamed obscenities at the sky, obscenities she knew he'd never hear, which was a shame, since it would have been quite educational for him. But he was gone, and she knew it, and she was nowhere near accepting it. At least she was feeling it enough to swear at him. At least her hatred had gone, in Frost's sense, from ice to fire.  
  
No matter how awful the situation, it's impossible to keep crying forever. Once the tears had faded, she looked up hesitantly. The sky had gone from dusk-gray to full black while she'd sat there. Still surprised by the occasional residual hiccup, she maneuvered her car carefully back onto the road and drove back to Seattle at twenty-five miles an hour, much more slowly than she needed to, as she attempted to sort things out. She didn't get much sorted out in the twenty-minute drive home, but it somehow seemed a victory to be trying, to be thinking about it at all. Cried out now, she had a little more courage to face it all.  
  
She didn't know how long it would last, so she decided to make it impossible for herself to retreat once again. She wasn't going to die tomorrow. It was unclear whether this was a blessing or a curse. Either way she had to make the best of it.  
  
She picked up the phone and dialed Frasier's number. Cutting through his hello, she said simply, "Can I come over? There are some things we should discuss." 


	10. Chapter 10

As quickly as that, the world was looking different to Daphne. Even the difficulty and the pain embedded in her conversation with Frasier and Martin was necessary; it seemed to cement her resolution to address this head-on. She'd never had to put the whole thing into words before; the phrases "HIV-positive" and "left me" staggered lumpily off her tongue. But it was a relief to have it out. No turning back now.  
  
While she was speaking, the faces of the Crane men went through the expected contortions of shock and sympathy and pain and something that might even be melodramatically termed heartbreak. It was their reactions after the revelations were through that surprised her somewhat. She'd worried briefly, before she went to them, that their conflicting loyalties might leave her a little in the cold. After all, Niles was their blood relative, and the three of them shared an uncommon bond - even Martin wasn't so much the odd man out anymore. They had an understanding and an abiding love for one another. Whereas she was a low-class British interloper, a former employee. If it came to a choice between her and Niles, how could she reasonably expect them to pick her?  
  
Yet she didn't see any of that in their faces once she'd finished. No warring emotion, no struggle to pick sides. The tale had left them speechless, but seconds after she was done Frasier stood and enveloped her in a long, powerful hug that started her crying again. When they finally pulled apart Frasier was wiping tears from his eyes as well, but he didn't seem to have found anything to say.  
  
Martin spoke up first. "I can't believe this," he said. She glanced over, found his face taut and strained, his eyes wide and fiery. "I can't believe it," he said again. He took a step towards her, leaning on his cane. "That's why he left?" he asked, and she could sense the pleading in his voice. Please, tell me it wasn't that way, he was saying.  
  
Of course she couldn't tell him that. She shook her head wordlessly.  
  
"Niles. My son. Niles did this to you and walked out on you? Without a word of explanation? He blew off."  
  
"He left a note," she mumbled.  
  
Martin shook his head - by now the rest of his body was shaking as well. "Damn it - that is *not* how I raised my son to behave!" he said, voice rising, and Daphne automatically took a step back from the hot shimmering fury that now seemed to encircle him in an aura. "A coward. I've raised a coward."  
  
"Dad -" Frasier tried to intervene.  
  
Martin shook his head again, and now his anger was trained on Frasier. "What is it, Fras? You going to try to defend him? Just try it. I don't know how the hell he brought this on himself but we know how he brought it on Daphne - Mel, too?" he asked, and Daphne nodded. He barreled on. "And I can't believe he'd walk out on a situation like that. I can't believe he'd be that low." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "I've had a million adjectives to excuse him over the years, you know. When he'd skip school to avoid the bullies I said he was high-strung. And when he ran away from every hard situation in his life, from Little League all the way up to Maris, I said he was just sensitive. I've been trying to avoid what he is my whole life because I didn't want to be ashamed of him. But I'm ashamed now." Suddenly the wind went out of him, and he sagged limply against the couch. "I raised a coward," he muttered, this time to himself.  
  
When it was clear the fight had gone out of him, Frasier gently put his arm around his father's shoulders. "I know, Dad," he said. "I'm ashamed of him too. But he's not the one we need to be thinking of right now."  
  
Daphne looked up disbelievingly.  
  
"Daphne," Frasier said, looking up at her, "what are you going to do from here?"  
  
She stared at him.  
  
"And how can we help?" Martin added.  
  
She stared at them a moment longer. Then with one incoherent sob she was flying across the room and into their arms. They hugged one another fiercely, protectively, with not a dry eye among them. Daphne felt a new strength seeping into her as she shared the embrace.  
  
When she pulled away, her expression was resolute. "I need to get to a doctor," she said, "and I need to pay my bills."  
  
"We can do that for you, Daphne," Frasier said.  
  
She shook her head. "I think I should pay my own debts. But thanks for offering."  
  
"Suit yourself," Martin said, his gaze traversing her four-hundred-dollar outfit. She elected to ignore the implication.  
  
"And the medical bills -" Frasier began.  
  
Daphne shook her head again. "First of all, Mel was ahead of you on that one," she said with a small smile. "Anyway -"  
  
"Mel?" Martin asked, clearly fighting back an urge to rub his ears.  
  
She nodded, and a faint but mischievous smile dawned on her face. "Yes. She and I've gotten friendlier since all this. She's really not so bad."  
  
Frasier cleared his throat. "Wait a minute, Daphne - you're telling me you've befriended Mel? Mel -"  
  
"Yes, Mel-Niles'-bitchy-ex," Daphne cut him off. "I don't think any of us saw her at her best before. Now she's found herself a girlfriend she seems much happier," she couldn't help adding.  
  
"*What?!*" they both cried.  
  
She couldn't help but grin, though she would have dearly loved to make it through this deadpan. "Yes. Name's Kyra. Nice woman. Anyway," she said, talking over their astounded expressions, "she already offered to pay for that, and though if it comes to that I'd rather take money from you than from her, it seems a little premature at this point. I just want to focus on finding meself a good doctor. And cutting up my credit cards."  
  
"Well, leave the doctor thing up to him," Martin said, jerking a head in Frasier's direction. Frasier nodded in affirmation. "And whatever else you need, you let us know. Niles may be gone but that doesn't mean you're not part of the family, you know."  
  
She nodded wordlessly, unable to speak for the lump in her throat, and caught him in a hug that was almost violent. She was surprised to find him reciprocate with at least equal strength - this from a man so notoriously opposed to physical displays of affection.  
  
When they pulled apart they were both crying again, but this time Martin had recovered enough to be embarrassed. "Something in my eye," he said gruffly, limping off to the kitchen. Daphne laughed and leaned against Frasier, suddenly exhausted.  
  
"It'll be all right," Frasier said eventually, as she rested against him, eyes closed.  
  
She glanced up. "Excuse me, Dr. Crane, but of all the things you could say that one is definitely not true."  
  
"No, really," he protested, and she could see he was serious. "This may not even be a death sentence. The medications for HIV are getting better all the time, patients are living longer and longer all the time -"  
  
"Yeah, look at Magic Johnson," Martin confirmed, coming back in with a beer. Daphne wanted to warn him that that would only increase the likelihood of another emotional outburst, but held her tongue. "He was diagnosed with HIV like a decade ago, and he's still going strong."  
  
"Who?" Frasier asked, wrinkling his brow, and Daphne and Martin both laughed.  
  
"Anyway," Frasier said, clearly not liking their shared laughter any more than he ever would, but prepared to overlook it this time, "the point is that research in this field is progressing in leaps and bounds. These new medications may keep your disease from progressing until a cure's found."  
  
Daphne smiled, not quite able to believe it, and quite sure that even if she could believe it she probably shouldn't. She'd rather be surprised by a miracle cure than die feeling cheated out of a false hope. "Maybe," she said. "But right now I think I'd better just focus on - well, right now."  
  
"Wise," Frasier said. "In that case, I'm going to start making calls now to find out whom you should see at the hospital."  
  
"Now? It's a Saturday," Daphne said.  
  
"Oh, someone will be there. Hospitals don't close, you know," Frasier said, and click went his study door behind him. Martin turned to her.  
  
"He wants to feel like he's doing something. Believe you me, he will find you the best care in Seattle," he said.  
  
She nodded. "Oh, I know." Feeling her business here was concluded, but not wanting to leave, she sat on the couch. "Do you mind if I hang around awhile?" she asked. "It's sort of lonely at the apartment."  
  
"Oh - yeah! Yeah!" Martin said, hobbling back to his chair. "I'd love that." She smiled at him.  
  
"I'll even let you pick the channel," he said, throwing the remote at her, and she laughed. On second thought, though, his action seemed rather savvy. She'd done all the talking she could handle for one night.  
  
"Home shopping it is, then," she sang out brightly, and flicked to channel 62, where a stunning faux diamond tiara was revolving on a blue imitation- velvet display. Martin made a face and stretched a hand out for the remote.  
  
"Within reason."  
  
She laughed and flicked to Turner Classic Movies, where Cary Grant was heckling an earnest-looking Ralph Bellamy. She looked over at Martin.  
  
"Good enough," he concluded.  
  
"I love Cary Grant," she said, once she was sure she wasn't going to be told to change the channel.  
  
"Maybe we can get you to meet him. Is he dead?" Martin asked. Daphne laughed, then laughed harder when she realized he wasn't entirely kidding.  
  
"Oh, please, Mr. Hollywood Insider there. This isn't the One Last Wish program anyway. Now hush, I'm missing my movie." Rosalind Russell was speaking about three hundred words a minute, so that missing even a second's worth of dialogue was a legitimate concern. They both settled back to watch.  
  
"So," Martin said in a conspiratorial tone, "Mel turned out to be a lesbian?"  
  
She laughed and threw a pillow at him.  
  
"No, really. That's kind of -"  
  
"Sod off, old man, it's none of your business," she said, rather enjoying this.  
  
"But -"  
  
"Later!" She gestured towards the screen, and shushing off the rest of his objections, she settled into the movie with a sense of calm she hadn't felt in months. 


	11. Chapter 11

I don't even know if this is posting properly anymore, but there doesn't seem much to do but post it anyway and hope it works. Enjoy.  
  
Chapter 11  
  
On the surface, the new calm seemed perfectly natural; life was so much calmer now she'd finally decided to face up to it all. And contrary to expectation, it wasn't the calm of despair; as she got herself on a course of medication and (rather reluctantly) found herself a therapist, Daphne was paradoxically less and less aware of her illness. Or perhaps it wasn't her awareness that had lessened, but her attitude. Her therapist (a youngish black woman she'd picked for her energy and directness and complete lack of resemblance to Niles) was guiding her towards a healthier perspective on it, and she was beginning to realize that she might still have a good few years ahead of her, and the best thing - the only thing - she could do was to take advantage of that. That little sandpapery thought - I am dying, I am dying - took a break now and then. She was more peaceful.  
  
But more melancholy. More subdued. She was quick to smile but not as quick to laugh; often happy but rarely exuberant. When compared to the bubbly woman of just a few months before, the woman who had run out with her boyfriend's credit cards to make a bunch of small frivolous household purchases to begin a new life - think back to that woman and the differences are clear. Things had changed and they weren't going to change back.  
  
It was hard. Easier, now she'd given up the struggle to push it all away. The first rush of feeling had been sheer hell; the rebound, however, was less painful than the repression had been. But there were still so many moments of rage and pain and heartbreak - as much because of Niles' abandonment of her than because of the death sentence he'd handed her. Sometimes she wondered how different this would feel if he were at her side, if he were there to hold her through the long white nights and whisper in her ear. She ached for him, for the seeking pressure of his lips on hers, the warmth of his flesh against her own. It hadn't escaped her notice that in leaving her he'd more or less condemned her to a life of celibacy; there didn't seem to be any such thing as "safe sex" under these circumstances. She wanted to make love to him, feel that rush again, hear his desperate pleading cry at its climax. She wanted him, simply, powerfully, a longing that seemed bred of blood and bone - inescapable.  
  
Of course she knew it was stupid and weak to want him the way she did, after what he'd done to her. He had clearly shown that he wasn't worthy of her love. But the love which had taken seven long years to flower had grown in strong, too strong for her to manage; there was no way to sever it now. She wrestled with it every night, clutching an empty duvet and burrowing into the pillows as if to hide from it all in there.  
  
By day she could face up to it, most of it. The nights were the worst.  
  
Her friends began to notice how wrung-out she was looking, the bags under her eyes and the pallor to her skin that were the product of her wretched sleepless nights; Mel, seemingly unaware of the grotesque implications, suggested a sleeping pill prescription, and Frasier actually wrote one, tucked it in her pocket against her protests. She told herself at first she didn't need it, told herself she was stronger than that, but as the days wore on and the nights wore longer she found herself craving sleep at any cost, and began taking them. They put her to sleep and spared her the sleepless hours; but, not having brought Niles back, they seemed rather beside the point. Most of Daphne's life seemed beside the point that way.  
  
But she struggled through it alone. Not alone, really - she thanked God fervently and often for this newfound support system. She had a frightening understanding of what Mel must have been feeling the night she downed that bottle of Valium; she'd been alone, then, much more alone than Daphne was now. But then Kyra had come along, and now - even if it was only one person, one relationship - Daphne envied her that bitterly. She had all the support she needed to make it through the days, and now she had the pills to get her through the nights. But there was a hole in it all.  
  
Did it all have to come back to that? she wondered angrily, many a time. Why is it that no matter where I start, no matter what I try to think about, it all ends with him? He's left me long since - how long will it be before he leaves me in peace?  
  
He isn't coming back, she told herself, time and time again. He isn't coming back and that's all there is to it. I wanted children and I'll never have them and I just have to deal with that. I found my soulmate and I lost him and I just have to deal with that too. In time I'll resign myself. I'll have to. This can't go on forever. In time, it won't hurt anymore.  
  
Time wore on. It still hurt.  
  
It did hurt less, though, and the less it hurt the steelier her resolve became. There was a hardness at her core that hadn't been there before. What she'd gone through surely ranked among the worst of human betrayals; making peace with that had its cost.  
  
She'd made it, though, and she could still smile. That seemed all the victory she needed right now.  
  
And then he came back. 


	12. Chapter 12

He came back on a Friday night. The rest of the world might be out partying, but Daphne, who'd long since sworn off the dating scene, was curled up quite happily in her oversized recliner, watching TCM again and eating Ben & Jerry's Phish Food directly from the carton. It was the sort of thing she'd learned to tell herself she cherished, this sort of down time with herself. Later, she'd be pissed off that Niles had simply assumed she'd be home. Why wouldn't she be out dancing the night away at a singles club?

But never mind that just now. He was back.

His knock, of course, couldn't give away who it was behind the door, and with a dismaying lack of prescience, she stood to answer it with no particular qualm. However, when his voice bit through the door she froze. "Daphne, are you in there?" came the call, and she stood immobile, letting the words die away. Unable to believe what she'd just heard. Her mind was almost completely blank. A little word wafted across it unhurriedly - …_how… _and eventually faded away. Her hands curled around the end of the sash on the bathrobe.

"Daphne." Dear God in heaven, how did he have the right to come back here now with that *commanding* note in his voice? "Daphne, I know you're in there, Frasier said you would be home –" he'd gone to *Frasier* first?! And Frasier had let him come *here?!!* The italics and exclamation points were driving out the numbness rapidly. Sooner or later she'd have to do something. Like open the door.

She opened the door. Saw him there, saw him for the first time in months, standing there gleaming all over with the omnipresent Seattle rain. She saw him and felt his presence for the first time in so long, and she wanted to do so many things -– hit him, scream at him, shake him, demand answers from him – (and there was a little rogue wish to kiss him, too, that she shoved down fiercely). She wound up paralyzed instead. Not entirely paralyzed. Her hands were trembling fiercely.

In the cymbal-crash of a pause while Daphne stood clutched by silence, Niles looked her up and down, slowly. She'd gained a little weight since he saw her last. Her hair was shorter. Leaning in a little bit, he inhaled, seeking the old familiar scent – but what was this? Was it possible she'd changed her shampoo?

Knowing there was no good way to open this conversation, he asked.

She shrugged, violently, caught by a shiver. "I switched to something cheaper," she said, voice low and gravelly. "Trust you to notice." She stared at him, much too scattered to ask him the question she would have liked to ask – _Is that the best you can do? _Too scattered to fling the door shut in his face. Not too scattered to weep, to collapse into sobs – but that she would not do. She held her chin high. She had no idea why he was here or what he was after, but more than that, she had no idea how she felt about him (damn that surge of tenderness she'd felt at her first glimpse of him! Damn him for coming back here and confusing everything!)

Her voice was still low when she pried the next few words out. "What do you want?" She swallowed. "Why are you here?"

He reached out for her and she drew back instinctively. "Daphne. Love." (Her ears wanted to close themselves off from the danger in that last word of his.) "I know I don't have the right to be here. I know I don't have the right to ask your forgiveness. But I –" He broke off. She was glad to see he was struggling. "May I come in?" he asked.

She debated a moment; then she held the door open. He slipped past her. He'd lost some weight since he'd been gone. She wondered, with more dispassionate curiosity than erotic feeling, what he looked like with his clothes off now. 

He sat down gingerly on the couch, looking around the apartment and noticing the changes. "A lot of things have changed," he said, clearly meaning only a commentary on the new furniture; but they both heard the subtext, of course, as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He flinched; she reddened and felt the numbness starting to dissipate in the heat. "I'll just put this ice cream back in the icebox before it melts," she said, ignoring his comment and refusing to look at him. He nodded. 

There was time in the kitchen to check her reflection in the spotless stainless-steel of the sink. She ran her fingers through her hair, retied the sash on her bathrobe, and wished she had time to put on a little makeup –

No! That was not what this was about! What was she thinking?

She rerumpled her hair and marched back out to the living room.

She sat on the couch opposite him. He was making a show of watching The Bells of St. Mary's, as if to make it seem that this were a casual visit. She shut it off. He looked at her. 

She hated having him look at her that way. He should not look like he still loved her. Because if he did still love her, then every bit of progress she'd made towards dealing with this was shattered. She had a lot invested in his being a complete asshole. How was she ever going to move on if he was just weak and confused?

What the hell was she going to do if he was just weak and confused? What the hell was she going to do if he wanted her back?

"So." She sat back against the couch, noted peripherally that there was pain in her thighs. She looked down. She was gripping them convulsively. She released her grip and looked back up at him. "I wasn't expecting to see you again."

He nodded quickly. "Daphne, I know. I can't say I'm sorry enough, but please, if you'll let me explain –"

"Explain?" She sat forward. "Yes, an explanation would be nice. Why don't you explain why you ran off on me, Niles, is that a good place to start? No, why don't you explain how you ran off on me about twelve hours after you told me you gave me AIDS. Oh, and while we're at it, why don't you explain where you've been all this time, why you haven't given me so much as a phone call, and oh, yes, you never did explain before how you got us both into this situation. Let's see, you can explain all that and then you can explain how the hell you have the nerve to waltz back in here like you still live here, how the hell you have the nerve to come back here and tell me you want me back!"

He hadn't said that yet, but of course it had to be true. Why else would he be here? And as further confirmation, he didn't deny it. Oh, no. 

She pressed her hands against her stomach to try to keep the sickness back.

"You're right." Her head snapped back up. "And I don't even know what I can say. God, I was so afraid it would be like this…" He drifted off, and she could see he was on the brink of tears. She sent him wild thought-waves forbidding him to do any such thing. She couldn't deal with it.

"You hate me now," he said finally, voice low and nearly inaudible. "Well, I don't blame you." He was looking down so she didn't have to watch the tears bubbling out of his eyes. She watched them splash on his knees.

That tenderness she hadn't been able to control ruled her briefly. Her voice was gently when she spoke. "If you have an explanation, Niles, I want to hear it."

He glanced up, wiped his eyes. "All right," he said. "But I know –"

"No, let's not talk about – how I'm going to react," she said. "Just tell me why you did all this."

"All right," he said again, and cleared his throat. "I – oh, God. Where do I start?"

A good question. She pondered a second. "Just – go chronologically," she said finally. "Whatever." Just say something, dammit.

"Oh." He cleared his throat again, nervously. "That means going back to – to when I – when I – contracted the virus."

She'd forgotten that, had been thinking back to his leaving her; but she needed an answer there too, and she would be impressed if he managed to give one now. "Why not," she said, closing her eyes briefly. She could feel him gathering himself.

He explained, briefly and obviously with a great deal of difficulty, how, in the aftermath of his divorce from Maris, his loneliness and confusion and about fifteen drinks had driven him to Aaron's bed. "It was one time!" he cried, as soon as he'd gotten the worst out, as she was still staring blankly at him. "Once. I'd never…" He broke off there, apparently unable to lie to her and tell her it had been a bad experience. "It was not anything that made any great difference in my life," he finished finally. "And I've never done anything of the sort since."

"So you slept with a man," she said slowly, sorting it through in her mind.

He looked down at his lap, forced himself to nod. His hands were wrapped around one another so tightly the knuckles were white. 

"That's what you thought you couldn't tell me, before."

He nodded again.

"All right…" she said. "Okay. Next explanation, then."

He looked up at her, astonished. "You don't want to… to talk about this some more?"

She shook her head. "There are more important things to talk about."

"But – it's just –"

"Oh, for God's sake, Niles, what's the bloody big deal? So you experimented a little, so you had a fling with a man, so what? If I ever had a problem with that I'd have to've dealt with it years ago when me brother Billy came out of the closet. Not to mention Uncle Jackie down there in California, I lived with him for six months, don't forget. So have you jumped the fence permanently or are you bisexual? Or was it just a mistake?"

He stared at her speechlessly for all of thirty seconds. "Um – bisexual. I think," he said finally.

She nodded, businesslike. "Fine." There was a second's pause. "I am glad you told me."

"You know, I am too," he said slowly. "I'm just surprised you're not more – well, surprised."

"Oh, I'm surprised," she said. "But we have more important things to deal with."

"Yes." His jaw tightened. "I'm afraid the rest of what I have to say might be even harder to hear."

"I'm sure," she said smoothly. "Still."

"Right."

He staggered through the rest of it somehow. If you condensed what he said, there wasn't much there. He'd left because he was afraid and so ashamed he couldn't bear it. He couldn't watch her dying, couldn't watch her going through this. He'd left to try to start over somewhere else, and he'd made it as far as San Diego, but in a sense he'd gone nowhere. He hadn't opened his own practice down there, had hopped on at a severely understaffed free clinic, and spent the last few months dealing with a special brand of rawness he'd stayed clear of in his days of catering to the rich in Seattle. He hadn't done it for any new fulfillment, though, but simply because it was the easiest position to get, and by the time he realized how woefully underqualified he was to be doing it, it was too late. The work depressed him, depressed him because so many people he saw needed so much help and he didn't feel capable of giving it to him. And the work had been the best thing that had happened to him since he left, the white noise of his life that kept him from feeling the reality beneath: the reality that he'd run from all his problems, had resolved nothing, and had abandoned and betrayed the woman he loved in the worst way possible.

It was the first time in the conversation that he'd said he loved her. She sat very still.

He went on for awhile, almost babbling, and she realized that now he'd started talking he didn't want to stop. He didn't want to have to hear what she would have to say.

Eventually he had to stop. He looked at her. Naked eyes.

"None of that is a surprise to me," she found herself saying. He winced. She realized that was a cruel thing to say. It was, however, true. "Now all you have to explain is why you're here."

He raised his eyebrows, startled. "Oh. I thought – I thought we'd been through that."

"When were we through that?" she said, confused and annoyed, somehow.

"The way you said that…" He made himself stop. "I'm sorry. I need to say it outright."

"What is it?" 

His voice was quiet and extremely careful. But if voices could bleed, Daphne thought, this one would be. "I came back here because I found that I couldn't live with what I'd done," he said. "I think I left because I had the idea that I wasn't going to have to live with it. But this – AIDS doesn't kill you that quickly."

"I had to find out the same thing," Daphne said, before she could stop herself.

He bit his lip. "I know. I wish we could have found that out together – oh," he said, breaking off as he realized he'd just taken a giant step he hadn't been quite prepared to take. "You know what I'm going to say," he continued in time, more quickly. "You know why I'm here. And I haven't wanted to say it, because it is low of me, to – to do what I did to you and then not just leave you alone once you'd put it all together again. I know it would be better for you if I stayed away." She held herself rigid, unable to avoid admitting to herself that she couldn't fully agree with him there. But she was not going to say it. 

"But I just can't live without you, Daphne," he said finally, and her head shot up. "I can't do it. It's a cliché and it's terrible of me to do this to you but I can't help it. You are the love of my life, and I am still alive. I couldn't help hoping. . ."

She looked at him, struggling to get his tongue around those last few words – "that you would take me back" – and suddenly had to end it. Leaning forward, she placed a finger lightly over his lips. He glanced up at her, eyes rounder than before.

"I'm not going to make you beg… I don't want to listen to it," she said, not unkindly. "But I don't know what my answer is. I can't – I can't answer you that quickly. I'm sorry."

"Of course," he said. His expression had shown no change, except a hint of relief, perhaps, that she hadn't thrown him over immediately.

As the silence grew longer he said "Would it be better if I left now?"

She nodded. "I think so. I hope this isn't… you have someplace to stay, don't you?"

He wrinkled his brow. "I hadn't really thought of that. Do you think Frasier will put me up?"

"Er… it might be better if you found a place in a hotel for now. Unless he welcomed you back with open arms when you came to ask him where I was."

Niles thought a moment, then nodded. "Good point. I was too fixated on finding you to notice how… A hotel it is, then."

She smiled. "All right then." Reflexively she began to move towards him, ready to kiss him on the cheek –

And stopped. What the hell kind of a reflex was that? Now?

She smiled faintly as he left the room, too dazed to say goodbye.


	13. Chapter 13

So this isn't really a completed section. My summer classes just entered the final stretch, and what with two eight-page papers and two final exams on the immediate horizon, this has had to go on the back burner. However, I didn't want people to think I'd abandoned this, so I decided to post what I have at present and I'll update it again when I have more. don't go away, this will get finished. ;)  
  
Chapter 13  
  
So she had a decision to make. And. and she was going to make it. A calm, rational decision - not precluding real emotion, of course, but sentiment was out. Definitely. She was going to think it all through and come to a clear decision that would be right for her. She was going to do it alone, of course. She couldn't afford to have her perceptions clouded by someone else's perspective. She sat on the couch for a few minutes, knees hugged up close to her chest, thinking.  
  
Abandoning pretense, she picked up the phone and dialed Frasier's number.  
  
Frasier sounded nearly as confused as she felt. The difference was that he, being Frasier, was shielding the complexity of his emotion behind blinding rage. He was doing a wonderful job of it, and there was something vaguely comforting in listening to him rant. He'd been going on for a few minutes, bellowing about the nerve of his brother to come back expecting that nothing would have changed, when it struck her that he was effectively taking her side over Niles'. He was oversimplifying, clearly, and she knew he was much more torn than he was letting on. He loved his brother dearly, after all, and having seen the way Niles' flight had crushed him Daphne couldn't believe that his only reaction on having Niles back was anger. It didn't take a psychiatrist to know that anger was easier to deal with than a flood of conflicting emotions.  
  
Still, he hadn't necessarily had to choose anger. He could have sided with Niles, could have told Daphne that Niles had made amends by coming back, that he was very sorry and she would be a fool to throw away the life they had made together based on one mistake. It didn't quite ring true; Frasier did anger much better than sentimentality, anyway. But it said something, that he had chosen to be furious with Niles. She suspected it meant that at absolute core, Frasier was still disappointed in his brother. In other words, that his coming back wasn't enough to make up for his leaving.  
  
She listened to Frasier for perhaps fifteen minutes, then politely asked if she could speak to Martin, not having gotten a word in edgewise in those fifteen minutes. Frasier handed the phone off willingly enough (she pictured him going to continue his rant to the new rhododendron on the balcony). Martin, in contrast, was nearly silent. Also characteristic.  
  
"I don't know what you want me to tell you, Daph," he said. "It's your decision. I don't want to interfere."  
  
"Oh, come on, old man, you spend your life not interfering. This is different. I'm asking your opinion."  
  
"What I think doesn't matter. All that matters is what you think. And what Niles thinks," he added as an afterthought.  
  
"But what if I don't know what I think?" Daphne asked, fighting back tears. "Please, it's not like I'm going to get angry with you if things go wrong - and do you want me crying on the phone?" she added, with one small vestige of canny sensibility.  
  
"No, I don't want you crying on the phone," Martin mimicked, and then stopped. He sighed heavily.  
  
"Look, I can't tell you what to do. I just -"  
  
"Yes?" she said, leaning into the pause.  
  
"I think you two both need a lot more time to think this through," he said. "I've seen a lot of messes happen when people just rush right into things, the way he wants you to do. He's had a lot of time to think, but you haven't, and I don't think it would be a good idea for you to take this at his pace. Okay? He'll wait."  
  
"You still didn't tell me what you think I should do," Daphne said.  
  
"And I'm not going to. Because, frankly, I don't know what the hell you should do. I don't even know what I'd do. The whole thing's a mess."  
  
"Dr. Crane - Frasier - was going on and on about self-respect, and self- worth, and self - oh, I don't know, all sorts of things that start with self."  
  
"Well, it may sound like a lot of psychobabble coming from him, but you do have to watch out for yourself, Daph."  
  
"Yes. but. oh, I don't know! What we had together was so good, and I really - I mean, we were in love, and I just don't -" She felt him squirming over the phone line and broke off. "I don't know. You're right. I need time to work this out. Do you think - do you think he'll be okay with that?"  
  
"I'm sure he will, but if he isn't, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference," Martin said crisply. "Take all the time you need."  
  
She smiled a little. "Thanks, Mr. Crane. Why is it you're the only Crane man who's not a psychiatrist, and you're the only one I can get any kind of a straight answer from?"  
  
"I think you just answered your own question," Martin said, and Daphne laughed. "What are you going to do now?"  
  
"I just told you, I don't have a clue. You were the one who told me to take my time."  
  
"I mean this afternoon."  
  
"Oh. I don't know. Think, I suppose."  
  
"Well, don't think too hard. Sometimes that's the best way to get yourself even more screwed up," was Martin's parting advisory.  
  
Probably. But it was hard, this business of not thinking too hard. Shopping might have cured it, and in fact Daphne was two pairs of shoes up when she caught herself. She knew that wasn't what Martin had meant, either.  
  
But what else was she supposed to do? 


	14. Chapter 14

Ohhhhhh. Finals. If this sucks you can't blame me. Email my Brit Lit TF. Tell it to him.  
  
Chapter 14  
  
"You want *my* advice?" Mel asked disbelievingly, the next day over lunch. "Let me get this straight. Niles has come back - Niles wants you back. And you're asking *me* what you should do?"  
  
"Well, why not?" Daphne asked, fighting off a wave of dizziness. She'd been having brief spells of mental vertigo on and off since Niles had knocked at her door. Understandably. "You and I are friends. Friends ask one another for advice sometimes. What's so strange about it?"  
  
"Oh, stop playing the innocent, Daphne - you know perfectly well what I mean," Mel snapped. "I suppose you're asking me this because you think I have firsthand experience, don't you? I mean, he dumped me before he dumped you, so you're thinking I figured out long ago what I'd do. That it?"  
  
Daphne looked down. Of course she knew her motives had to be fairly transparent, but she'd hoped to be able to shroud them a little longer than that.  
  
"I wish you would stop doing this," Mel said, and now her voice was strained. "You're always dragging me back through all that, when I should have been able to forget about it long since. Has it ever occurred to you -"  
  
"Well, I'm sorry!" Daphne cried, voice rising. "This isn't about you, you know! What do you want me to do, pretend Niles doesn't exist whenever I'm around you? I'm asking your advice because I'm more confused than I've ever been in my life, I don't know how to - it doesn't matter! Because it makes you uncomfortable, right? That's what's important here. I'm so sorry I bothered you." She shoved her chair out from behind her roughly - recognizing, on one level, that she was being more than a little bit unfair, but enjoying the brief Frasierian catharsis of ranting her troubles away.  
  
"Wait," Mel said, partially raising a hand. "Don't leave yet." Daphne sat down and waited, but the silence which ensued was forbidding. She crossed her ankles under the chair and bit her lip. This had been a stupid idea. Anyone could have told her that.  
  
"I don't know what I can tell you, anyway," Mel said finally, her voice low; she wouldn't look at Daphne. "It's your decision. I'm not sure what you feel I could possibly have to offer." She glanced up quickly, then back down.  
  
Daphne managed a little half-smile. "Much as I hate to admit it, you sort of hit the nail on the head with what you said before."  
  
"But it doesn't matter what I would do," Mel responded quickly. "It doesn't. What the right decision for me would be has nothing to do with the right decision for you."  
  
Daphne sat back in her chair, clenched her fists. "Everyone is saying things like that to me. It's starting to drive me crazy. I'm just asking your opinion, for heaven's sake."  
  
"Oh, all right. Just don't take this for more than it's worth. I'm not going to be responsible for that." She paused, and Daphne could see her face setting itself carefully - proof, as if she'd needed it, that this was not going to be an easy conversation for Mel. Time had passed, she'd found someone new, but what Niles had done to her had not completely healed over. For a brief moment, this became the clinching argument: how could Daphne take Niles back after what he'd done to Mel?  
  
For her? The world went blurry again. Her resolve vanished.  
  
"It's difficult to tell you what I would do, just because there are - were - so many stages," Mel said finally. "I sound like him, don't I? The stages of grieving and healing and all that. Sometimes I hate how much I took out of that relationship." She sighed. Daphne waited.  
  
"That doesn't matter," she finished finally, snapping out of it. "All I'm trying to say is that there isn't one answer. Right after he - you know, right after you two went riding off down that driveway -" Daphne winced - "and he told me he was - he was leaving me, there wasn't a chance in hell I'd have taken him back. I know that sounds strange, but I just couldn't have done it. I was furious. After that wore off. all right," she said quickly, and cleared her throat unnecessarily. "I was just miserable. And of course - you can't just - shut off being in love with someone." She cleared her throat again. Daphne was silent, lost in the words. It struck her, as if it were a new idea, how much she would love to be able to shut this off. She'd like nothing better than to be over him, even if it did mean spending the rest of her life alone.  
  
"And at that point, yes. If he had come to me, if he'd told me he'd realized he'd made a mistake and he wanted me back, I would have taken him back."  
  
"So that would have been the right decision for you?" Daphne said, thoughtfully and distantly.  
  
"No! Oh, God, no," Mel said, and Daphne looked back at her, startled. "This is what I mean. I don't know how things are for you. I don't know whether - oh, don't you see? If I had somehow reconciled with Niles. I suppose I'd have been happy, in a way. Or I'd have thought I was." She stopped. When she started again it was clear she'd thought this all through before; indeed, it almost seemed a carefully practiced speech. "Niles just wasn't right for me. And being in love with him had nothing to do with it, not really. I loved him but it was the sort of thing where I was always afraid I was going to lose him -" Daphne winced again - "I was never really comfortable with him, because I could always sense there was something going on that he wasn't sharing with me. And I was always overcompensating, trying to make him forget about it, whatever it was." She was kind enough not to specify that "it" was naturally Daphne herself. "I was always trying so hard to prove I was smart enough or cultured enough, it was like I had to be on all the time, trying to keep him. It almost felt like a competition. And I didn't mind it, then, but now that things have changed and I'm with Kyra I wonder how I could ever have done it in the first place. It's so different now." She shrugged, a deliberately casual gesture which was ludicrously at odds with the context. "I'm sorry. I'm off the point."  
  
"No, this is helping," Daphne said.  
  
Mel arched an eyebrow. "Is it?"  
  
"I think so." She shook her head. "You're saying you didn't look hard enough at the relationship while you were in it, right? That it would have been a mistake to go back to him because you weren't right for one another."  
  
"I suppose." Mel said dubiously, and then laughed. "I'd hate to admit it can all be summarized that easily. I thought I was saying something original."  
  
Daphne nodded, the picture of abstraction.  
  
Mel sat forward a little. "This is the last thing I'm going to say, because I am really sick of talking about Niles Crane and I don't intend to do it anymore. But before you make a decision, make sure you know whether or not you can deal with the strain of being in a relationship with that man. Because it's perfectly clear to anyone who knows you two that you're in love with him - no, wait -" she said, as Daphne started to interrupt. "That doesn't mean that that's enough. If you can't trust him, I don't think it's worth much of anything."  
  
"So love's overrated," Daphne said, with a short, bitter little laugh.  
  
Mel smiled thinly. "That wasn't my point, but I am not in the mood to debate it right now. I'd really like to change the subject, if you don't mind."  
  
"Of course," Daphne said automatically.  
  
"And if it's all the same to you -"  
  
Daphne smiled a little. "I'll never bring Niles up again."  
  
"Thank you."  
  
The conversation tottered a little after that and then fell flat. Daphne excused herself early. Her thoughts were beginning to resolve. She wasn't sure she much liked the decision that was starting to form.  
  
But it was the only one possible. 


	15. Chapter 15

Sorry about how long it's taken me to get this up. Finals were hectic and awful and crazy and terrible.  
  
There'll probably be one more chapter, but this is the big one, folks.  
  
Chapter 15  
  
She didn't want to make the decision so quickly. Or, rather, she didn't want to admit it had been made so quickly. Really, her own volition seemed to have nothing to do with it. At a certain point the answer had presented itself. There had been no choice made. Perhaps it was that against which she rebelled, which made her take the extra day, thinking it through carefully and completely unnecessarily.  
  
Three days after he had come to her apartment, she called him, at nine in the morning precisely. Standard waking hours as designated by the business world, she thought with only a slight coloring of humor. He was an early riser anyway. The opportunity to caress her sleeping form, in fact, was the only thing which could ever coax him to stay in bed later than -  
  
He picked up on the first ring.  
  
(He couldn't have been waiting by the phone for three days. That would be ridiculous.)  
  
She heard herself asking him to come over, heard herself falling back on the tried-and-true cliché of "we need to talk." Heard him agreeing rapidly, eagerly, and a little fearfully. He dropped the phone without even saying goodbye, too anxious to be on his way. She replaced the receiver slowly.  
  
They were nervous with one another when he arrived, circling one another warily, like boxers in a prize fight. Looking for openings, not for attack but for appeal. Each hoped fiercely that the other could understand. That they would be together in this, the most wrenching decision of their lives.  
  
"So," Daphne said finally, clearing her throat. "I suppose you guessed I've spent these past few days doing a lot of thinking. About us." Of course. She cursed herself for her inanity.  
  
"Understood," Niles said, seating himself gingerly in an armchair. She realized she was pacing and sat down as well, across from him.  
  
"There's a lot to think about," she said, wondering why she couldn't move through this any faster. "It's not simple, you know - I mean, I know you know that. One thing I do know -" she said, deciding to get to some sort of point, anyway, "is that -" She fumbled for words. "I told you I loved you. Before," she said, and he nodded, his expression one of agonized hope. "I want you to know that that. that hasn't changed," she said.  
  
He jumped. Tears leapt to his eyes, and he made as if to cross the room towards her. She waved him down. "No, please," she said, "let me just get through this, please." He nodded, sinking back down into the chair, still looking jubilant but also a little puzzled.  
  
"It hasn't changed," she said, clearing her throat again, "I don't think it could. You know I've told you I loved you so long before I ever realized it. now I have realized it, I don't think it could go away just like that. Well, it could go away, of course it could, but you'd have to - well, you'd have to do a lot worse, I'll just say that," she said, and smiled. He almost laughed, caught himself. "Who you are - that hasn't changed, Niles. All the things about you that I fell in love with - they're still there. Impossible for me to change over that quick, you know?"  
  
He looked as if he wanted to cut a caper. She hated to ruin this for him.  
  
"But."  
  
He caught the tone of her voice. The fear reentered his eyes.  
  
"All that. all that's still there," she went on. "But. but it's not all that's there."  
  
Blue eyes, still a little tearstained, wide and puzzled - how could she do this to him?  
  
I'm not doing a thing to him, she reminded herself. This is the way it has to be.  
  
"You hurt me," she said bluntly, too upset herself now to put it delicately, and his brow darkened for a second and then went flat. "You walked out on me, and I know you had your reasons, I know you were hurting, too. I know the last thing you would ever want to do is hurt me, and that's mostly why I can still love you." A flurry of quick, confused emotion flitted across his face and then subsided. "But you're. you're weak, Niles."  
  
His brow creased a little. He opened his mouth a little, as if to speak. She would have let him. But he stopped. She read in his silence his tacit agreement.  
  
She went on, though. Fumbling, but feeling as though she had to explain. Besides, she'd thought it through so thoroughly, it would be a shame to waste all of that. "Walking out like that was the worst thing you ever did to me out of weakness, Niles, but of course I knew about it long before. I never imagined it would - I never imagined it would affect our relationship, because I was giddy, in love, I thought nothing could go wrong, but looking back, I was a fool to think you could be strong just for me when you -" She noticed the exceedingly firm set the line of his jaw had taken and stopped a moment, confused. But this needed to be said. "The way you let yourself be walked on by Maris all those years, the way you let her hurt you just because you couldn't stand up to her -"  
  
"I loved her, Daphne," he said, and she could see he was getting angry. She supposed there had been no way to avoid that. "I wanted to make it work."  
  
"Did you?" She shook her head. "Maybe at first, but eight years is a long time to love someone who treats you that way. I think for a long, long time you just couldn't stand up to her and tell her you were leaving."  
  
He had no answer to that.  
  
"And then how you couldn't tell me how you felt about me -" She saw the shocked betrayal in his eyes, and she bit her lip. This wasn't quite as bad as she had feared, but experiencing the reality was so much worse than the imaginings that it seemed to make no difference. "God, Niles, that was another seven years - even if you take Maris into account, you could have asked me when you were separated, or even early on when I was with Donny - God, anything would have been better than what we ended up doing to Donny and Mel -" He winced automatically. "And I know part of that was my fault, but Niles, you waited seven years to tell me. Out of fear."  
  
"This isn't fair," he said, and his voice was low. "Daphne, I did stand up for you, I conquered that -"  
  
"Yes, and left a wife of three days brokenhearted behind you," Daphne snapped, and he started, taken aback. She smiled a little. "Sorry about that. Mel and I've formed a bit of a friendship."  
  
"Yes, Frasier told me," Niles said, still looking a little startled. "He also told me, if I recall, that she's much happier now and things have ultimately worked out better for her."  
  
Daphne shook her head. "Yes, she is, but then why were you even dating her in the first place, Niles? You were using her to forget me - it was unfair to both of us, and you did it out of fear. You don't see anything wrong with that?"  
  
He looked down. "I don't know what you want me to say. Nothing I say will be the right answer anyway."  
  
She softened a little. "I'm sorry, Niles. I never meant to be this harsh -"  
  
"No, let's be honest, all right?" he said, looking up at her. "You had an agenda when you invited me over here today, and I think - or I hope, anyway - that you've just about covered it. Please don't try to pretend this was an accident. You've been brooding over this for a long time."  
  
She nodded. "Yes."  
  
"So that's it, then," he said, looking up at her. "You're in love with me, but I'm weak. You're dumping me. End of story, shall I get my coat and hat and find my way to the door?"  
  
She shook her head. "No, no, Niles, I'm not. oh, God, Niles, the last thing I want to do is "dump" you, the way you put it, but." She groped for words, found none. He stared at her helplessly.  
  
"Please, Daphne," he said at last, voice low and gravelly. She looked up.  
  
"I'm sorry," she said. "This is hard for me."  
  
He gave a short, barking laugh. She followed it with a more genuine one.  
  
"Not half as hard as it is for you, you're thinking."  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Well, don't bet on it. Oh, Niles, I -"  
  
"Enough with the 'oh, Niles,' bit," he said, his voice low and excruciatingly controlled. "Just - tell me what you're going to do. Please."  
  
She nodded. "Fair enough."  
  
Deep breath.  
  
"I don't want to break up with you, Niles. it's just. things are bad without you," she said, surprising herself. "But." Another deep breath. "There are some very bad times coming for us, and. it's why I was talking about the weakness thing, Niles. How can I trust that you'll be here for me? I mean, what happens if my disease - what if it progresses first?"  
  
He looked up in some surprise. Neither of them had so much as thought about AIDS for the duration of the conversation thus far. It had been about the two of them, and the important things they shared, in their minds, did not include HIV.  
  
"Could you watch me die, Niles?" she asked, deliberately blunt. "Could you stay with me through that?" A pause. "Or would you have to leave?"  
  
"I." He struggled. "I don't know," he said finally.  
  
She nodded, thankful for his honesty. "Niles, if I were to take you back, I'd have to know you'd be there for me, completely. And I don't know that. You're the person I fell in love with, but that only makes it worse if you walk out on me. I can't hurt like that again. I have enough to deal with."  
  
Silence.  
  
Finally he nodded, clearly with an effort. "Very wise," he said, standing up.  
  
She rose as well. "Are you going to be okay?"  
  
He shook his head, abstracted. "I don't know," he said. "It's." He looked at her and laughed, a tiny burst of hysteria. It was gone almost immediately. He reached out to touch her shoulder gently.  
  
"Can I still see you?" he asked suddenly.  
  
She nodded vigorously. "Oh, yes. Please. I didn't mean - maybe you misunderstood. I still want to see you, Niles, I still want to be around you, I just don't want - the depth of commitment we had. A trial period, maybe."  
  
"Dating?" he said warily.  
  
She smiled. "I suppose. You know, we never really did that. One kiss and we'd thrown our spouses by the wayside. Maybe all we ever needed was to take things more slowly."  
  
"Maybe." He smiled, a tender smile that turned inward. He bent forward and kissed her on the cheek gently. "Goodbye, Daphne."  
  
"I'll see you soon," she said, seeing him out the door. Watching the door fall shut behind him.  
  
She leaned back against the wall with a long, exhausted sigh. 


	16. Chapter 16

This is the final chapter of this story. Thank you all for reading.

Chapter 16

It had been too easy, of course.

Life was never that easy. She'd never hoped to have him out of the apartment without a meltdown on both sides. Tears, pleas, screams, threats, the whole package. They'd shared too much, both of joy and of heartbreak, to have it end – or even tamed, lessened – so easily.

Of course it couldn't last that way for long, and Daphne knew it. She credited Niles' initial, relatively calm reaction to shock, waited for the phone calls she knew would come. Therefore, the passionate outpouring of pure denial she received courtesy of Sprint didn't surprise her in the least. He understood what she was feeling but this was all wrong, he tried to tell her, choking over the words. He knew he'd hurt her but this wasn't right for either of them. For both of their sakes they needed to move on together. He could be strong, he repeated at least half a dozen times. He could be strong for her.

Daphne could barely bring herself to answer him, as biting her lip and shaking her head didn't translate through the phone line. It wasn't that way, she tried to explain. He couldn't be strong for her because he loved her, that wasn't the way it worked. If he loved her less, she tried to tell him, there would be less danger; if he loved her less he would be more capable of seeing her through the hard times he'd inflicted on her. He'd flee – he'd done it before. The fact that he loved her argued that he would not be able to handle it when things got really difficult. Loved her with his brand of love, that was.

And what brand of love was that? he asked, voice shaking.

She didn't have the heart to answer "the weak kind." On inspection, it proved the wrong answer anyway. She amended what she'd said.

The problem, she told him, isn't how you love me, but that you don't have the strength to back it up.

She'd already said that and she knew it wasn't going to get through. He hung up there. She suspected he didn't want to cry on the line. He probably thought she would have construed it as further proof of weakness. She wouldn't, but by then he was already gone, and of course she wasn't going to call back.

He called again the next day, as she'd known he would. He was into his analytical phase by then; she didn't much like the hard edge to his voice, but she had to admit he was easier to deal with this way. He wanted to know how this was going to play out. Were they dating? Yes, she answered, they were. With what frequency? How seriously? Were they allowed to hold hands, to kiss, to join one another for a nightcap at the evening's end?

"You'll forgive me for the specificity, but I really don't have any idea where to start," he said with a short, barking laugh. "After what we've shared, I'm finding it hard to hit the rewind button and stop us at that exact point, six months or so back, when we were exactly as serious as you feel we should be now."

Of course she had no answers for him, and she had a feeling he didn't really expect any. Part of the problem was that they'd never *been* at that stage, she tried to explain. They'd gone from being friends to being the most passionate of lovers with no interim stage whatsoever. (He tried to object that that was precisely why they'd put off sleeping together for so long; she resolutely squelched her suspicion that that had more to do with her rapidly expanding body than his desire to know her better, and told him quite honestly that that was beside the point – they'd treated one another as the most devoted of lovers from the moment they'd put that Winnebago into gear, and the sex had nothing to do with it.)) They needed to sloe down, she told him, and she might have come to feel that way even if it weren't for the current crisis. In that conversation, she was the one who ended on a vaguely pleading note, which is probably why they hung up on civil terms.

They adjusted. Over time. There were many, many variations on those two calls before they managed it – Niles was quite naturally swinging from love to anger with a bipolarity and frequency which was mildly surprising even to Daphne. But it lessened, over time, with Frasier's help. Frasier, Niles learned very early on, was not as satisfying a confidante as he'd usually been in the past; he was firmly entrenched in Daphne's camp on this one. But that was ultimately more helpful, and eventually things began to play out roughly as Daphne had envisioned.

They did begin dating, if dating was any term to use for people who'd known each other so intimately in some ways and in other ways not at all. There was a good deal of shyness and some suspicion when they began this arrangement, but eventually they began to discover the pleasure of talking to one another, and to rediscover the friendship they'd almost lost when they began steeping in sexual tension. Their conversations were at first deliberately light, neither one willing to broach more serious topics. Paradoxically, this only kept the wounds fresher.

But over time, they began to be able to discuss deeper hurts – and there were plenty of those, underlying their whole relationship, quicksand ready to shift at the slightest provocation. Talking about it helped put it to rest. A little. Niles couldn't talk about his guilt, certainly not to her, and that was a problem, a major one. But they talked about how it felt to be facing a drastically foreshortened future – in short, how it felt to be facing death in a way most of us are hardly ever reminded to do. He was a better confidante for her than Mel, Daphne had to conclude with a little rueful smile one day. There was a reason she'd always loved him so.

The always wasn't accidental, and she supposed, in moments of sentimentality, that it had to be linked to a forever. But it wasn't enough, she kept reminding herself. He had to prove himself. She had to know that he was not going to run out on her before she could consider being with him again. She loved him but the self-help industry was booming with mass-market paperbacks on how to get over loving men who were not worth loving, and if driven to it she could buy one and get on with her life. (Or so she told herself.) Love wasn't enough, she told herself, contradicting thousands of years of romantic notions. Love was not necessarily enough.

God, it was hard to believe.

The good news was that he was staying. He was staying and he was seeming to be stronger. Day by day he was talking a little more openly about what he'd done to her, how they could deal with it, how to make the best of the rest of their lives. Day by day she saw him facing up to it a little more. Day by day she trusted him a little more. He was on probation but he'd shown nothing but exemplary behavior so far.

And the fact that she was in love with him probably ought to be taken into consideration at some point, beyond its not being enough. At some point she probably ought to weigh that in in his favor, see where the scales lay then.

Their first kiss post-breakup had been awkward initially, then sweeter as they found one another again. They'd broken apart for a short second, and then the mutual smile had been enough to send them over the edge again and they'd relaxed into another, longer, deeper kiss.

Maybe the rest of it all could work out that way. These brief moments of trust – just the prologue to the real thing.

At least, with Niles around, Daphne could think in terms of some kind of a future. Whether they came together as a couple or remained in this shy half-joined state for the rest of their lives, he got her thinking outside of herself and beyond her disease. She did the same for him, she knew. In the end, that was all that mattered – making whatever was left of their lives more worth living.

THE END


	17. Author's Notes

So this is rather unorthodox of me, but hey, they do it at the backs of published books all the time - those "readers' guides" or "discussion questions" or whatever. Basically, between reviews posted here and emails I've gotten people seem to have a lot of questions about this story, and (just for starters) I'm too proud to let them go unanswered if it means people think I unwittingly made lousy story choices. If you think this is incredibly self-indulgent and unnecessary, you're welcome not to read it.  
  
1.) Where the hell did this story idea come from? (Corollary question: Are you some sick perverted freak who gets off on tormenting helpless sitcom characters with soap opera storylines?)  
  
I have gotten this question way too many times, considering I have no answer (which makes the answer to the corollary "quite possibly," I'm sorry to say.) But while I like the show Frasier as a sitcom, it's got more depth than most sitcoms, and that's probably got something to do with it. Also these subjects are of interest to me right now and most television dramas are not.  
  
Why would you make Niles bisexual? Couldn't you have had him have a brief dalliance with a heroin addiction if you wanted him to get AIDS?  
  
A couple of reasons. For one thing, it amused me that while Frasier and Niles are two of the most stereotypically gay-acting characters on television - and the show plays that up all the time - there's never been a fanfic written that played into that. For those of you who said his having had a gay affair was OOC, I. do not know what you're talking about. :) And again, the subject's of interest to me, so it wound up in the fic. I think bisexuality's a lot more common than most people believe or let on - why not let Niles have a little fling with a guy? Sounds like fun to me. ;)  
  
Do you really think Niles is weak?! (Insert lots of offended defense of the man.)  
  
In a word, yes. :) I tried to outline my reasons in chapter 15, and if you don't buy into them then I guess we have to agree to disagree. I actually didn't think the subject was up for debate - I thought it was kind of generally conceded that he was a doormat, no matter what his virtues. And I'm not one of those people who believes that being in love automatically makes you strong, which is supposed to be one of the main themes of the piece. Niles may be in love with Daphne, but until he grows a backbone (assuming you agree with me that he doesn't have much of one as of now) it's not going to do either one of them all that much good when they hit a rough spot. Part of the theme of the story is supposed to be his growth in this regard, his recognition that no matter how much he loves her, some things are going to have to change if he wants this relationship to work. How well it worked I have no idea, which sort of leads me to question -  
  
Are you aware your story completely fell apart at the end?  
  
Yeah, sorry. :( I got distracted by my NOVEL I'm writing! Which is posted in the originals/novels section here! :: shameless plug:: Sticks and Stones, by Cybele Russell! (Click on my name! It will take you there!) More slash! More melodrama! Many, many more words! (It's a novel. :)) It's tough for me to maintain focus on two stories at once, and between a fanfic and an original the original's always going to win. So hopefully all the lost polish on this one was transferred over onto S&S, making it a truly sparkling piece of fiction. ;) ::end shameless plug:: Anyway, even if things got a little rushed at the end, the basic events went as I'd planned them, so you can complain about the writing or the execution and I'll blame it on my novel, but if you complain about the plotline that was a deliberate choice.  
  
Do you think it's at all, oh, over-the-top for people to use such words as "terrible," "destructive," "inexcusable," etc. in their reviews?  
  
Why, thank you for asking. ;) It's a fanfic, people. ::sigh:: I *suppose*, for peace' sake, I can be convinced not to complain about over- the-top reviews containing such words as "amazing," "exquisite," and "Nobel Prize-worthy" ;), but I hardly think it's fair to suggest I've degraded myself in the writing of a fanfictional story.  
  
How come Daphne was such a bitch to Niles, saying all that stuff about how he was weak and they couldn't be together? That was so mean of her! Doesn't she love him?  
  
::sigh:: I'm not sure if you can have a compilation verbatim quote, but I got that out of a few different emailed and posted reviews. No, I wasn't going for a bitchy effect at all. I was going more for someone trying to achieve an honest and respectful discussion. If that's how she feels (and it's sure as hell how I would have felt if I'd been in her shoes, which is, unsurprisingly, why the story played out the way it did) then it would be disastrous for both of them to stay together. Believing he's weak and incapable of maintaining a trusting relationship is very different from not loving him. And trying to avoid telling him that or addressing that would only make things a thousand times worse.  
  
Are you going to write any more fanfics?  
  
Probably not for Frasier, no. Check for me in other fandoms if you're honestly interested. (And read my novel! :: return of shameless plug::  
  
So that's about it. It's kind of late and this is probably a stupid idea, but it seemed easier than emailing a bunch of people with a bunch of questions directly. Thanks for reading, everyone! 


End file.
